Comment by gostsamo
16 hours ago
Unpopular take, but:
I work in python. It's only real and big issue is the slow interpreter. Everything else is resolvable one way or another. The only other big issue it has is the envy of people who imagine that if not for python, their beloved language would be as used as python is now. Most of their beloved languages are older than python or when they were created, they had much bigger ticket backing than python and those languages are still not where python is. The reason? Python is made to solve the issue one has now, not the issue one might have in the future. Local optimum at its best and worst. And honestly, most people have the current issue to solve and rarely reach the imaginary issue to be. If python didn't exist, it would have been invented.
The issue is that it just becomes a “bad at everything” tarpit.
- performance is awful.
- gradual typing is sort of ok, but relies too much on runtime behaviour.
- async support is a bit all over the place.
- uv has made the packaging experience sort of liveable, but collectively it’s still very limited: feature support, conditional dependencies, rudimentary tree shaking, cargo-style workspaces, etc.
In an era where your options of tech stack are freer than ever, unless you explicitly need PyTorch, I’m not really sure why you’d choose Python over literally everything else.
What would you choose for a backend nowadays then?