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> I've been seeing a growing anti-python sentiment lately, and most of it seems to be based on these sorts of odd perceived language defects. I've seen the sam

> I've been seeing a growing anti-python sentiment lately, and most of it seems to be based on these sorts of odd perceived language defects. I've seen the same, but to me it feels like the downslope of the hype-train that was brought on by the ML crowd. Early on there was python doing python things, and the (IMO overly smug) community was happy with that. Then the AI/ML hype train fired up and for historical #reasons python became the language of choice, and this introduced a LOT more people to the language, and it became their lingua franca. Now, those people are having to write honest to god applications and are finding that python is Hard To Scale, both technically and code-management-y. IMO. Reasonable people disagree.

pydry 6y ago
"Hard to scale" isn't really a coherent argument against any mainstream programming language. It's kind of like saying that AMD processors or Microsoft Word are hard to scale - it's not entirely meaningless as a criticism but it's close to it. Python is not a language for writing ultraperformant multi threaded code but, of course, that's not what it used for or was ever intended to do and is an entirely separate issue to scalability. Reasonable people disagree about well defined, important matters.
- Thiez 6y ago
  > "Hard to scale" isn't really a coherent argument against any mainstream programming language. It is odd that you would say that, because it is a very common complaint about languages with dynamic typing. As the program grows larger static typechecking becomes more and more helpful.
  - pydry 6y ago
    That is one of the many interpretations of "not scalable" I suppose... Regardless, python has tools to do that. Instagram and Dropbox in particular have written quite a lot about their internal usage and built and open sourced additional tooling (e.g. MonkeyType - that lets your code type annotate itself).
    - youerbt 6y ago
      Fact that they had to do that does prove the point, doesn't it? How about organizations that hit the scaling point, but are not big enough to invest into tooling like that?
      - pydry 6y ago
        No. MonkeyType is open source. It's exactly the kind of tooling that makes your life easier if you have multiple teams and wanted to start enforcing static type checks with MyPy and having an IDE that understood your types.
        youerbt 6y ago
        So before it was open sourced, all those companies that couldn't pull it off themselves had scaling problems or not? So before Python had types was it hard to scale or not? Seems like you are defending "Python with types and lots of tooling" rather than Python "nice and simple language (until not)".

pydry 6y ago

"Hard to scale" isn't really a coherent argument against any mainstream programming language. It's kind of like saying that AMD processors or Microsoft Word are hard to scale - it's not entirely meaningless as a criticism but it's close to it. Python is not a language for writing ultraperformant multi threaded code but, of course, that's not what it used for or was ever intended to do and is an entirely separate issue to scalability. Reasonable people disagree about well defined, important matters.

Thiez 6y ago
> "Hard to scale" isn't really a coherent argument against any mainstream programming language. It is odd that you would say that, because it is a very common complaint about languages with dynamic typing. As the program grows larger static typechecking becomes more and more helpful.
- pydry 6y ago
  That is one of the many interpretations of "not scalable" I suppose... Regardless, python has tools to do that. Instagram and Dropbox in particular have written quite a lot about their internal usage and built and open sourced additional tooling (e.g. MonkeyType - that lets your code type annotate itself).
  - youerbt 6y ago
    Fact that they had to do that does prove the point, doesn't it? How about organizations that hit the scaling point, but are not big enough to invest into tooling like that?
    - pydry 6y ago
      No. MonkeyType is open source. It's exactly the kind of tooling that makes your life easier if you have multiple teams and wanted to start enforcing static type checks with MyPy and having an IDE that understood your types.
      - youerbt 6y ago
        So before it was open sourced, all those companies that couldn't pull it off themselves had scaling problems or not? So before Python had types was it hard to scale or not? Seems like you are defending "Python with types and lots of tooling" rather than Python "nice and simple language (until not)".