Comment by depressedpanda
3 days ago
Agreed.
After starting my new job and coming back to Python after many years I was happy to see that they had added `match` to the language. Then I was immediately disappointed as soon as I started using it as I ran into its weird limitations and quirks.
Why did they design it so poorly? The language would be better off without it in its current hamstrung form, as it only adds to the already complex syntax of the language.
> PEP: In most other languages pattern matching is represented by an expression, not statement. But making it an expression would be inconsistent with other syntactic choices in Python. All decision making logic is expressed almost exclusively in statements, so we decided to not deviate from this.
> We've had conditional expressions for a long time.
Also, maybe most other languages represent it as an expression because it's the sane thing to do? Python doing its own thing here isn't the win they think it is.
The Python core team has kind of run the language off the rails post 3.7 or 3.8 or so. There's been so much crap bolted on to the language for dubious reasons, and often times it comes with whole new sets of weird problems without really making life easier (async was a quintessential example of this in my mind). There's a lot of design choices core to the language itself that make it a poor choice for many tasks, but that never stops anyone from doing it anyways and bolting on lots of chincy "features" along the way.