this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Programming
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My opinion: Python may not be the best at everything it does, but it's in the top 3-5 languages in the following areas:
It will always be a practical choice for those reasons. There are probably a lot more as well that I can't think of at the moment.
Python is popular because it's whitespace based syntax make noobs think it's easy to read. This and it's pre-installation on Linux made it popular amongst academics who embraced it for data analysis. This lead to a lot of data scientists embracing it and writing libraries for it which created a virtuous cycle in that arena.
And it's a damn shame because Python, and it's whitespace nonsense and lack of type system, is a horribly impractical language for building anything at scale.
It's not made for scale. Use C/C++ or something if you want scale.
It can scale though. It parallelizes really well if you use queuing systems to distribute the load. You just have to make sure that the hot loops are in C/C++, and it is very easy to interface with compiled binaries via the C API.
So can assembly. But it takes a tremendous amount of discipline.
Python's curse is that it's popular with "newbs" who think it's okay to use dictionaries for everything and that type hints are "clutter".
Agreed. I have seen a lot of Python code that was really painful to massage back into a more structured object hierarchy. Java certainly does a bit better in that respect, and as a language, it does a much better job of encouraging better practices, but I think it's also largely due to the kinds of people that use those languages as well.