If they didn't have very good objective reasons the new GC is better, they never should have shipped it. If they do, they should not have reverted the change.
I felt like the tooling in Racket, CLisp, and Java were similarly pragmatic and not either religiously devoted to some concept of "backwards compatibility" that I seriously doubt most people actually need, or "ease of use" that actually proves itself to be easy when you consider the not-happy-path of the beginner tutorials. Racket, I didn't continue just because the library ecosystem isn't mature enough to keep up with the latest in databases and other 3rd party services. Java I quit largely because of Oracle and some 2010s problems with stagnation. CLisp mostly because it was too hard to socialize. But never because I thought the core language and tooling were holding me back.
People mostly defer to requests because they do not track language development closely and because we are creatures of habit.
I try to avoid non-stdlib packages when stdlib will do a good job, but I received negative feedback from people who aren't aware of the updates and couldn't foresee supply-chain attacks.
Urllib2 is now also gone and mostly replaced with urllib.request.
It should cover 99% of the use-cases one would use requests for — I am not sure how and why it matters that it is a subpackage and not a top-level package?
This is just a natural evolution of a widely used language where you have to be careful with backwards compatibility.
A Python codebase might well use requests, but it will almost always also heavily use the standard library.
Historically, the standard library made sense. And we're talking about a history that stretches back to before Internet connections were ubiquitous, to say nothing of connection speed.
Now the standard library is full of things that they refuse to remove because it would supposedly be too disruptive, but which they would never think of adding today if they weren't already there.
Packaging can be irritating although uv takes the sting out a bit.
You are right that outside of verbosity, once you get used to the syntax of a language, the value of one over the other kind of fades.
uv proves the OP’s point. Why couldn’t the core team and the core-adjacent PyPA make a tool as liked as uv, and why is the Python package manager uv written in Rust and not Python?
Incredibly large backward-compatibility burdens [0], internal politics [1] and general institutional dysfunction (no footnote; if you're familiar then you need no explanation, and if you aren't then the less said the better). Nothing to do with Python as a language. Most of the important pieces to get uv-like performance are algorithmic choices, and most of the rest are available as built-in C code in the reference implementation [2].
(Edit: wait, I recognize your username. You should definitely know these sorts of things.)
> why is the Python package manager uv written in Rust and not Python?
Because that's the language that Astral devs like, and because installing Python itself is considered in scope for uv so there would be an intractable bootstrapping issue.
[0]: In particular, the entire model of `setup.py` defining metadata is certifiably insane, especially when you consider the projects that expect to feed that code to Setuptools at build time in order to figure out what version of Setuptools is needed at build time. But this legacy approach is seen as something that absolutely must be guaranteed to work for well beyond even now; even attempts to remove long-deprecated, minor aspects of that functionality end up breaking major projects, including ones that didn't even require a build step in the first place [3].
[1]: Most obviously, GvR not wanting to have anything to do with it when initially approached by the SciPy people in IIRC 2011, leading to the creation of Conda). But a lot of other things, too. The backwards-compatibility issues synergize with this; consider for example the architectural dumpster fire of Setuptools, and the timeline of distutils removal from the standard library.
[2]: See e.g. my analysis in https://zahlman.github.io/posts/oxidation/ .
[3]: See e.g. my LWN article https://lwn.net/Articles/1020576/ .
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7802575
From the link: "You know why I'm not running python 3? Because it doesn't solve a single problem I have. It doesn't solve anyone's problems. It solves imaginary problems, while creating real problems."
Because of the libraries, not necessarily the language, which is also quite straightforward. For example we found a niche library that speaks the ISO-TP protocol in Python, which allows us to communicate with vehicle ECUs. That's why people also use C++, even tough I quite doubt it's because they like the language. Add to that that it's also heavily used in embedded programming. Yes, you could call a C/C++ library from another language, depending how well the language can do that.
I prefer Ruby, but Python probably has just about everything one would need. It's also great for data processing. We hardly have anything better than pandas, polars, numpy, scipy in other languages and that:s without even mentioning ML tooling.
They are as standard as arguing about Ant, Maven, Gradle in Java, npm, pnpm, yarn in node, and so on.
However I fully agree with the gist of your comment, basically Python is the new BASIC.
However at least BASIC was compiled, with exception of the 8 bit home micros.
Syntax really does matter more than you give it credit for. Were that not the case, I'd expect one Lisp or Scheme dialect or other to take Python's place. Outside of that counterfactual, Python's competition was stuff like Ruby, and it turned out that network effects were also pretty important.
Even if you dislike the direction Python is going in, a lot of what attracted people to Python in the first place is still there. The readability, the large standard library, the huge ecosystem. There are libraries and frameworks for everything: numerical stuff, web development, GUIs etc. Its actually a nice language in itself, just going in the wrong direction now.
If you look at it historically it was really good comparatively. If you compare it to the alternatives available 20 years ago it looks pretty good.
Take list comprehensions for example. It is mostly syntax: you can do virtually all list comprehensions with just a map and filter function. But the way that it is integrated and presents the code, makes is vastly easier to follow for most developers, which tilts the balancer in favor of doing away with loops and mutable state. Is it syntax that made them do so? Yes, maybe. But its the actual semantics that provide the value.