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Comment by tyre

4 hours ago

I felt the opposite, because Python isn’t a great language. It won because of Google, fast prototyping, and its ML interop (e.g. pandas, numpy), but as a language it’s always been subpar.

Indentation is a horrible decision (there’s a reason no other language went this way), which led to simple concepts like blocks/lambdas having pretty wild constraints (only one line??)

Type decoration has been a welcome addition, but too slowly iterated on and the native implementations (mypy) are horribly slow at any meaningful size.

Concurrency was never good and its GIL+FFI story has boxed it into a long-term pit of sadness.

I’ve used it for years, but I’m happy to see it go. It didn’t win because it was the best language.

8 comments

tyre

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Sohcahtoa82  7 minutes ago

> lambdas having pretty wild constraints (only one line??)

I will never understand why people are upset about this.

You HAVE multi-line lambdas. They're called functions.

Yeah, I know you want a function that's only used once to be able to be defined in-line, but tbh I've always found that syntax to be pretty ugly, especially once you're passing two functions to a single call, or have additional parameters AFTER the function (I'm looking at you, setTimeout/setInterval).

zabzonk  4 hours ago

> there’s a reason no other language went this way)

Except of course for those that did, Haskell, Fortran for example.

  • bonesss  1 hour ago

    F# as well, and that tends to exist in parallel with some degree of C# written by the same devs… the indentation enables cleaner, smaller, simpler code function by function.

    It’s pretty ok in Python, but meaningful indentation is amazing with a proper type system and compiler. Clean, consistent, efficient, and ensures working code is easily read and standardized.

    I’m unaware of anyone accepting improperly formatted C# as ‘done’, and would reject any such PR out of hand because of the potential for legibility issues to hide bugs. So: if it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done by the compiler to save line noise.

groundzeros2015  4 hours ago

I’m always baffled when language complaints come down to syntax

  • Ringz  1 hour ago

    That’s exactly how I think, too. But at the same time, I like indentation in Python, because I would logically indent in every other language as well. In fact, I find all those semicolons and similar things at the end of each line completely redundant (why should I repeat myself for something the compiler should do) and I hate them. And that’s despite having experience with Modula and 10 years of C++. But when I look at Rust, I find the syntax simply awful. From an ADHD perspective…

smallerize  2 hours ago

Lambdas are intentionally kneecapped in python because Guido van Robson doesn't want to make a functional language. (As in "functional programming", not that it doesn't work.)