this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
71 points (93.8% liked)

Programming

22960 readers
44 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
UlrikHD@programming.dev
71
Why Is Python So Popular in 2025? (blog.jetbrains.com)
submitted 3 days ago by namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
97 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I think it's just because it is always recommended as an "easy" language that's good for beginners.

The only other thing it has going for it is that it has a REPL (and even that was shit until very recently), which I think is why it became popular for research.

It doesn't have anything else going for it really.

  • It's extraordinarily slow
  • The static type hints are pretty decent if you use Pyright but good luck convincing the average Python dev to do that.
  • The tooling is awful. uv is a lifesaver there but even with uv it's a bit of a mess.
  • The package system is a mess. Most people just want to import files using a relative path, but that's pretty much impossible without horrible hacks.
  • The official documentation is surprisingly awful.
  • Implicit variable declaration is a stupid footguns.

The actual syntax is not too bad really, but everything around it is.

[–] Vulwsztyn@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

syntax is bad for list operations, also there are situations where you need to count the number of parentheses you closed, which wouldn't happen of you were able to use fluent interfaces

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 0 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I think it’s just because it is always recommended as an “easy” language that’s good for beginners.

The only other thing it has going for it is that it has a REPL (and even that was shit until very recently), which I think is why it became popular for research.

If that's the case, then why didn't Javascript take its place instead? It's arguably even better at Python in both of those areas....

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago

But worse in everything else. And the runtime-platform is a mess.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

I think Python is superficially easier since you don't have to declare variables, printing is a little easier, etc. And in some ways it is actually easier, e.g. arbitrary precision integers, no undefined, less implicit type coercion.

But I agree JavaScript is generally a better choice. And it is actually more popular than Python so...