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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

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What language is universally better than Python? I don't think Python is perfect, but it is definitely one of the best languages out there. It is elegant and it is has a huge ecosystem of libraries, frameworks and tutorials. There is a lot of battle-tested software in Python that is running businesses.

Maybe something with dependent typing like Idris2 or a future Haskell release?

What?! It's one of the slowest languages on the planet, it's not type safe, it has not real concurrency.

I can't believe people say this with a straight face

> It's one of the slowest languages on the planet

It's fast enough for many use cases. That doesn't mean that there is no room for optimization, but this is far less a deciding factor these days.

> it's not type safe

You can do static analysis with Mypy and other tools.

> it has not real concurrency.

There's different mechanisms for running things concurrently in Python. And there's an active effort to remove the GIL. I also have to ask: What is "real" concurrency?

Admittedly, the things you mention are not Python's strongest points. But they are far from being dealbreakers.

>It's fast enough for many use cases. That doesn't mean that there is no room for optimization, but this is far less a deciding factor these days.

Everyone says this but its not really true. Every team I've seen do this immediately regrets it when they scale (like at all).

>You can do static analysis with Mypy and other tools.

Not even remotely the same

>There's different mechanisms for running things concurrently in Python. And there's an active effort to remove the GIL. I also have to ask: What is "real" concurrency?

Free threads. And yes this is a deal breaker in tons and tons of situations. I have no idea why people are soooo hard up for python

> cost of significantly better languages is essentially free

Is it? We still need meatspace humans to vet what these AI agents produce. Languages like C++ / Rust etc still require huge cognitive overhead relative to Python & that will not change anytime soon.

Unless the entire global economy can run on agents with minimal human supervision someone still has to grapple with the essential complexity of getting a computer to do useful things. At least with Python that complexity is locked away within the CPython interpreter.

Also an aside, when has a language ever gotten traction based solely on its technical merits? Popularity is driven by ease-of-use, fashion, mindshare, timing etc.

Yeah that's sort of fair today, although we have switched over most of our org to Rust and it hasn't been much of a problem. The LLM can usually explain small parts of code with high accuracy if you are unsure.

Overall the switch has been very much loved. Everything is faster and more stable, we haven't seen much of a reduction in output

Your stance is aggressive and provocative, but no less so than the challenge AI poses to software developers in general. I think what you say should be seriously entertained.

And as someone who loves Python and has written a lot of it, I tend to agree. It's increasingly clear the way to be productive with AI coding and the way to make it reliable is to make sure AI works within strong guardrails, with testsuites, etc. that combat and corral the inherent indeterminism and problems like prompt injection as much as possible.

Getting help from the language - having the static tooling be as strict and uncompromising as possible, and delegating having to deal with the pain to AI - seems the right way.

It's such a laughable take. First of all a language is never getting popular simply because it's good. Actually most used languages are usually terrible.[0]

Secondly it's non factual. Python's market share grew in 2025[1][2][3]. Probably driven by AI demand.

[0]: even truer for natural languages.

[1]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular...

[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...

[3]: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

Yeah the swath of billions of new devs that have a lower barrier to try out coding will navigate them to python

Yes most languages are terrible except the ones that are actually performant and good like Rust.

Do you really think AI agents of the future will be coding in Python??? What advantage would that possibly give them? That's the only laughable take here

Define future. If it means the next five years, yes, I absolutely expect people and machines to keep writing Python.

yes the next five years, and no agent in 3 years will be writing python outside of ML. Except if some fool is directing them otherwise. What benefits does it possibly offer them other than "I think python good"

I think there are many examples throughout history of better performing options not displacing counterparts. I think, really, the only "laughable" thing here is the ignorance on display that's riding atop the arrogance.

Rust is great. But AI isn't displacing Python anytime soon.

Moreso it sucks that Astral's been bought by a company with such a horrible leader at the helm.

lol yeah history isn't this, humans are dumb and follow herds to whatever end. Agents will be much more rational

That's an interesting take, but I'm not sure 'easy to write' is the only advantage.

There is also a really good ecosystem of libraries, especially for scientific computing. My experience has been that Claude can write good c++ code, but it's not great about optimization. So, curated Python code can often be faster than an AI's reimplementation of an algorithm in c++.

Yeah ML is the one of the only spaces I could see it living on, but even then doing it in C++ isn't that much harder for an LLM

I feel like this is a relatively hot take. Python has advantages beyond being easy to write. It's simple. It can do just about anything any other language can do. It's not the most performant on its own, but it's performant enough for 99% of use cases, and in the 1% you can write a new or use an existing C library instead. Its simplicity and ease of adoption make python very well represented in the training data.

If I ask an LLM or agentic AI to build something and don't specify what language to use, I'd wager that it'll choose python most of the time. Casual programmers like academics or students who ask ChatGPT to help them write a function to do X are likely to be using Python already.

I'm not a Python evangelist by any means but to suggest that AI is going to kill Python feels like a major stretch to me.

EDIT: when I say that Python can do anything any other language can do, that's with the adage in mind. Python is the second best language for every task.

> it's performant enough for 99% of use cases

My last two companies went all in on python and really regretted it. It's performance and concurrency primitives really hurt as you scale

Isn't that also an advantage for LLMs? Apart from more available data.

Let's see how it plays out. My current assumption is that degrees and CVs will become more important in the workplace. Things like good architecture, maintainability, coherence, they are all hard to measure. A true 10x developer without a college degree will lose to the PhD without any hard skills. And these types only speak python, so they will instruct the AI to type python. Or maybe they'll vibecode rust and elixir, I don't know. But the cynic in me strongly thinks this will make all our bullshitty jobs way more bullshitty, and impostors will profit the most.

hilariously bold take with no evidence to support the claim

Absolutely agree with this. I'm hoping via advent of agentic, Rust dominates in the next few years. It may even cause Wasm to be dominant as the new "applet" language.

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