Comment by shadowgovt
2 days ago
Python has a terseness that is hard to rival. I think that was a major selling point: its constructs and use of whitespace mean that a valid Python program looks pretty close to the pseudo-code one might write to reason out the problem before writing it in another language.
I doubt that this is the selling point. Imho it is nothing special compared to Haskell, F# and the likes.
Python doesn't require you to understand monads to write useful Python.
To be clear: Haskell is great, but its entire vibe (lazy evaluation, pure functions) is entirely different from what Python's about. Someone who knows C++ or Java has a much bigger gap to jump to pick up Haskell than to pick up Python.
True, they are all imperative c-style languages.
If that is the concern I would recommend anyone interested to dabble with F#. Part of its design philosophy is to keep the complexity out wrt type systems. It offers a vast vetted library¹, better dependency management², it is truly multi-paradigm (imperative, functional and oop), vastly better performance, and it is strongly typed without requiring type annotations³.
I know I am not going to sell it to monogamous devs, but those that are open minded should give it a try.
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¹ This is something people will start to appreciate once they get serious about the risk of supply chain attacks.
² Python developers feel they are doing fine with pip or uv, at least in my experience, but then I find they haven't dealt with package mgmt in alternative languages.
³ Types in python are a hack, bolting on something afterwards will not reach what is possible with a language that has been designed with types as core element.
It's a huge selling point for me and many I know who knows it. Nothing like code that you can read like you're reading a book/article.