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Comment by callc | Hacker News Reader

I coded happily in python for many years and fell out of love with it.

It doesn’t ship with a first party package manager so you got the community trying to fill this gap. Use any other language with good tooling like golang or rust and it is a breath of fresh air.

Python used as an actual PL is a footgun because it’s dynamic scripted. (Don’t tell me about using tools X, Y, Z, mypy, …) You essentially become the compiler checking types, solving basic syntax errors when uncommon paths are executed.

A programming language that’s only good for < 100 line scripts is not a good choice.

I honestly wish python were in a better state. I switched to rust.

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> Don’t tell me about using tools X, Y, Z, mypy, …

What's wrong with using tools that improve on common issues? I don't think I'd use Python without them, but ruff and pyright make Python a very productive and reliable language if you're willing to fully buy into the static analysis.

> A programming language that’s only good for < 100 line scripts is not a good choice.

What a bunch of crap. It's so trivial to show very popular and useful programs written in Python that far exceed this number I'm not even going to do the work.

What a lazy criticism.

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Hi rsyring, I made this comment out of experience.

As python projects grow and grow, you need to do lots of support work for testing and even syntactic correctness. This is automatic in compiled languages where a class of issues is caught early as compile errors, not runtime errors.

Personally I prefer to move more errors to compile time as much as possible. Dynamic languages are really powerful in what you can do at runtime, but that runtime flexibility trades off with compile time verification.

Of course, every project can be written in any language, with enough effort. The existence of large and successful python projects says nothing about the developer experience, developer efficiency, or fragility of the code.

All perfectly valid perspectives and I agree with most of what you wrote. But the comment above is pretty different from the tone/effort behind the comment I took issue with. :)

In hindsight, I should have just left it alone and not replied which is what I usually do. But Python's popularity isn't an aberration. It's tradeoffs make sense for a lot of people and projects. The low effort bad faith swipes at it from subsections of the HN community got me a bit riled today and I felt I had to say something. My apologies for a less than constructive critique of your comment.

Best.

Thanks for your comment. I definitely could have worded mine better too with a bit more effort and context.

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