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Comment by bnchrch | Hacker News Reader

Thank you! For years Ive been saying the sheer volume and fury by which Javascript is criticized is much more applicable to Python.

Both aren't perfect languages, and both are far from "the best" but it is maddening that Python get often picked as a darling when its implementation, ecosystem and tooling are fundamentally at odds with correctness and productivity.

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I think people pick on js more because it's the only option for scripting frontend for the web, while if you don't like python there's probably another language that can be used instead.

Unless you're doing AI, in which case you're royally screwed.

You can get by with R and reticulate.

the Python ecosystem for AI is far ahead than R, sadly (or not :-) )

Reticulate is a bridge that lets you use Python from R so that you don't have to suffer Python the language.

I'd say people pick on JS because they don't learn it. They jump in, use it like python or C++, get frustrated it's not the same as what they're used to, vow to use it as little as possible. This was especially true before es5/es6 with var function scope and no class syntax.

The author of this notebook does not appear to agree with you. They describe Python in the beginning as "beautifully designed".

This is not idiomatic Python code. It's code designed to demonstrate Python performance optimizations, through use of relatively obscure Python functionality which exposes details of the internals in situations where you need that.

"its implementation, ecosystem and tooling are fundamentally at odds with correctness and productivity"

You'll need a lot more than just this notebook to argue for that position.

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