Hacker News Reader

Comment by iberator | Hacker News Reader

Micro python is the last hope for Python. Python simplicity got destroyed by a bunch of new wave of programmers who packed a lot of new useless features into it in the past 10 yrars. Now it's NOT easy and small language as it used to be...

Feature creep is an awful side effect. I would love to have language having just few add-ons per decade so I can grasp it all

View on HN

>> "the last hope for Python"

Python is in the top 3 programming languages in the world.

Being lingua franca of AI and scripting world isn't enough for GP.

I know Python since version 1.6, it was never simple, people that don't read the reference manuals are the ones that think that is a BASIC like language in complexity, when in reality it has always been more into Common Lisp / C++ kind of sense.

I still do not understand how Python won out over lua. Which is imho the superior scripting language just constrained by a smaller userbase. Lua is like embeddable in what 500 KiB. While python takes its about 200 to 300 MiB

I think Lua is an interesting language and I really like it having TCO, so that I can properly write recursive logic like in a Scheme. However, I am somewhat worried about data structures. When I read about Lua, it always seems quite thin on that front. On the other hand I just looked up Lua data structures and found a book called "Programming in Lua" and the first page I read was about "tables", which I assume to be something like dictionaries in Python, and it says that arrays and others are implemented on top of "tables". What about immutable data structures? Are there libraries for purely functional data structures? How complete are they?

These things I don't usually look up for Python, because Python is clearly not a very functional language and doesn't have the immutable data structures at all, and doesn't even feature TCO, so basically Python is mostly lost, when it comes to doing FP, and I accept, that it is not really that kind of language. I only try to use FP knowledge to avoid common pitfalls, when coding in Python. But from Lua I would expect better.

No viral license in Python, very easy to link to libraries with python.

not sure which means more, but the second is definitely critical.

Lua has lots of ugly syntax and is 1-indexed. That's probably the only reason it never took off.

I don't think being 1-indexed is what made the reason.

While it was already in widespread use, Python really took off in the scientific/research community, thanks first to numpy and then to all the other libraries built on top of it up to the current crop of ML/AI libraries.

Those people used to write a lot code in Fortran, Matlab and R (depending on their research area) which are all 1-indexed.

Batteries included and a more sane language.

Also Lua is kind of frozen in version 5.1, if one cares about performace, while even if CPython only recently got JIT love, there are several other alternatives.

This is kind of a strange take to me given that Python is quickly becoming the default for many projects that 1) are not indexing for speed/efficiency and 2) is not on the web (and sometimes this only applies for frontend). There are plenty of cases where that statement is incorrect but I think you get my point.

I think I read a title on HN that was literally titled “Why Python Won” in late 2025.

Which useless features?

Amazing. We have actually gone full circle reactionary on the typing debate where duck typing is considered the "traditional" way by some.

Static typing and duck typing both date back to the 1950s. You may have heard of Lisp.

The last new significant thing invented in programming was OOP in the 1990s.

Everything else is just ancient, OOP was about bringing the benefits of micro-services to single computer environments. Yes, you read that right

The new ECS system for 3d games was used by the first computer drawing program Sketchpad in 1963.

Programming is mostly just recycling ideas around and around.

> Static typing and duck typing both date back to the 1950s. You may have heard of Lisp.

> The last new significant thing invented in programming was OOP in the 1990s.

OOP is from the 1960s (Simula 67 is generally recognized as the first OOP language.) Probably not actually the last new significant thing invented in programming, though.

All of them. Starting with syntax changes or type hints.... (Python should be always and only be duck typed forever as designed by God itself (it's creator).

> Python should be always and only be duck typed forever as designed by God itself (it's creator).

Isn't Guido the one who came up with type hints spec and made the reference implementation (Mypy)?

No, mypy existed before the type hints spec, and was created by Jukka Lehtosalo; Guido did, once he encountered it, work to make sure mypy could work with Python rather than being a separate, python-like language, and the type hints spec was a big part of that.

The issue is that duck typing with a minimal set of types was the great idea of ABC, which is the language Guido cloned to make Python

OK, so this is a troll.

async is the big one. it was half-baked

Yeah, async Python is one of the top 2 things that I just get pissed off when I think about it too much. Along with Lin-Manuel Miranda not being involved with Moana 2.

Walrus operator, match. They're just syntax sugar, but expand the vocabulary for little benefit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com