Comment by functionmouse
2 days ago
> Python 3.14.0 introduced a new incremental garbage collector. But reports of higher memory usage caused the Python team to revert the garbage collector changes in 3.14.5.
If they didn't have very good objective reasons the new GC is better, they never should have shipped it. If they do, they should not have reverted the change.
It's better in some ways (order-of-magnitude reductions in pause times were cited) but worse in other ways (higher peak memory usage). That the higher peak memory usage was catastrophic for some users only became apparent through post-release feedback.
They should have shipped it as an addon GC, not enabled by default. One could have turned it on with a command line switch or an env var, just like the Ruby JIT.
Really? You've never reverted a positive change because it contained a regression only discovered after release?
It's this sort of stuff that leaves me scratching my head why people like Python so much. I hear them say they prefer the syntax and personally I feel like that's such a small part of the holistic experience of working with any particular language. It's one of the reasons why I gave up on C++ years ago for .NET, the whole system of tooling in .NET has never left me feeling like I was pigeonholed into doing things in stupid, self-flagelating ways. Why should I use a language like C++ that doesn't provide a standard set of package management and build tools? Why should I use a language like Python that feels like it's being designed by amateurs?
I felt like the tooling in Racket, CLisp, and Java were similarly pragmatic and not either religiously devoted to some concept of "backwards compatibility" that I seriously doubt most people actually need, or "ease of use" that actually proves itself to be easy when you consider the not-happy-path of the beginner tutorials. Racket, I didn't continue just because the library ecosystem isn't mature enough to keep up with the latest in databases and other 3rd party services. Java I quit largely because of Oracle and some 2010s problems with stagnation. CLisp mostly because it was too hard to socialize. But never because I thought the core language and tooling were holding me back.
You are right the syntax is a small part of it, but it is more important than you say in this case because Python syntax is one of the things that makes it very readable.
Even if you dislike the direction Python is going in, a lot of what attracted people to Python in the first place is still there. The readability, the large standard library, the huge ecosystem. There are libraries and frameworks for everything: numerical stuff, web development, GUIs etc. Its actually a nice language in itself, just going in the wrong direction now.
If you look at it historically it was really good comparatively. If you compare it to the alternatives available 20 years ago it looks pretty good.
It's easy to start learning on, or prototype with, and then sometimes momentum just keeps it going. Also it may not really be the best at anything, but it's "pretty good" at just about everything. It's kind of like vanilla ice cream.
Packaging can be irritating although uv takes the sting out a bit.
You are right that outside of verbosity, once you get used to the syntax of a language, the value of one over the other kind of fades.
> Packaging can be irritating although uv takes the sting out a bit.
uv proves the OP’s point. Why couldn’t the core team and the core-adjacent PyPA make a tool as liked as uv, and why is the Python package manager uv written in Rust and not Python?
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C++ has vcpkg, conan, cmake and ninja nowadays.
They are as standard as arguing about Ant, Maven, Gradle in Java, npm, pnpm, yarn in node, and so on.
However I fully agree with the gist of your comment, basically Python is the new BASIC.
However at least BASIC was compiled, with exception of the 8 bit home micros.
> Racket, CLisp
Syntax really does matter more than you give it credit for. Were that not the case, I'd expect one Lisp or Scheme dialect or other to take Python's place. Outside of that counterfactual, Python's competition was stuff like Ruby, and it turned out that network effects were also pretty important.
> It's this sort of stuff that leaves me scratching my head why people like Python so much
Because of the libraries, not necessarily the language, which is also quite straightforward. For example we found a niche library that speaks the ISO-TP protocol in Python, which allows us to communicate with vehicle ECUs. That's why people also use C++, even tough I quite doubt it's because they like the language. Add to that that it's also heavily used in embedded programming. Yes, you could call a C/C++ library from another language, depending how well the language can do that.
I prefer Ruby, but Python probably has just about everything one would need. It's also great for data processing. We hardly have anything better than pandas, polars, numpy, scipy in other languages and that:s without even mentioning ML tooling.
Python is mostly about the “batteries included” standard library and what’s becoming nearly standard third party libs, being able to play around in the REPL,
The standard library is full of dead batteries. If the stdlib is so good, why does everyone install requests instead of using the stdlib http client? And why requests or something like it hasn't been adopted into stdlib after so many years of stability?
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> “batteries included” standard library and what’s becoming nearly standard third party libs
Historically, the standard library made sense. And we're talking about a history that stretches back to before Internet connections were ubiquitous, to say nothing of connection speed.
Now the standard library is full of things that they refuse to remove because it would supposedly be too disruptive, but which they would never think of adding today if they weren't already there.