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Comment by ActorNightly | Hacker News Reader

>Now I begrudge any time I have to go back to python. It feels like its beauty is only skin deep, but the ugly details are right there beneath the surface: prolific duck typing, exceptions as control flow, dynamic attributes. All these now make me uneasy, like I can’t be sure what my code will really do at runtime.

I feel like this sentiment is from people who haven't really took the time to fully see what the Python ecosystem is.

Any language can have shittly written code. However languages that by default disallow it means that you have to spend extra time prototyping things, whereas in Python, you can often make things work without much issue. Dynamic typing and attributes make the language very flexible and easily adaptable.

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Oh I’m familiar with the ecosystem. Yes the dynamic nature does make it easy to prototype things flexibly. The problem is when your coworker, or you, decide to flexibly and dynamically get the job on a Friday before a long weekend and then 3 months later you need to figure out how a variable is being set, or where a method is being called.

And thats no different than writing Rust with a bunch of unsafes, and a bunch of indirection as far as processing flow goes.

The nice thing about Python is that it allows you to do either. And naturally, Python has gotten much faster, to the point where its as fast as Java for some things, because when you don't use dynamic typing, it actually recognizes this and optimizes compiled code without having to carry that type information around.

It’s not the same at all. In Rust you cannot just throw an attribute on to a struct in the middle of a function because it makes some call further down the chain easier, no matter how much unsafe you use.

I’m not a python hater, you can’t get some great stuff done with it quickly. But my confidence in writing large complex systems in it is waning.

I can make an argument that you can never have a memory leak in Python, while you can in Rust if you use unsafe.

In the end, both languages allow you to write bad code. But having something that is less strict if you wanna be makes it more flexible.

it's faster to prototype in rust. this may seem counterintuitive, but when a rust program compiles, it generally works. not saying 100% and free from logic bugs, but a lot of the error handling, locks required, and checks for nulls have already been worked out by default.

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