3 ms·
Python is a boring technology. It's a 10+ years old language, like ~20 years behind cutting edge programming language research and implementation. Also, as for
by nnq 9y ago
Python is a boring technology. It's a 10+ years old language, like ~20 years behind cutting edge programming language research and implementation. Also, as for the programming style it encourages, it strongly nudges you against any "cool" way of programming: even the most basic kinds of functional programming is something you end up avoiding in P and "dumbing down" your code to more procedural idioms, and OOP over-over-over-architecting is something you just don't do because of the performance penalty and the lack of serious refactoring tools for large codebases. The side effect is that all code is more readable and understandble to anyone, including self-taught devs. JS itself is a boring language at its core too, except that it evolves faster than anything else. And the ecosystem is anything but boring (and also anything but sane...).
Cooler and more advanced (in terms of language features) languages are Julia (it has real macros, advanced type inference etc.) and even R (yeah, it's a mess, but as a language it's more advanced and "cooler" than Python). On the "web backend" scene Ruby is a way more "not boring" language, but the ML and science communities avoided it almost completely (I have a few theories as to why...).
And then there's the "truly cool" and "0% boring" languages like: Scala, Rust, Elixir, Clojure, Haskell, Elm, Crystal, Pony etc.
But don't get me wrong, I like Python for being what it is: an incredibly boring scripting language, that encourages a "stone age level" style of dumbed-down programming. With slightly awkward but stable libs (on which people agree almost unanimously of which to use). Because with Python I can focus on the product instead.
- steveklabnik 9y agoPython was shown to the world in 1991, and hit 1.0 in 1994, making it roughly 27 years old, incidentally. You did say 10+, but most people don't realize just how lengthy a pedegree Python has.