Python: The Documentary [video]

I’m happy that python basically took over the role once filled by matlab, and I’m happy that it became the leader in AI dev instead of something worse (probably Java if gpt2 had hit 5-10 years earlier).

But you’re right. It’s not fun anymore. It feels more like a pseudolanguage for expressing tensors now, because of the influx.

I’m exaggerating only in feigned outrage. In my actions, I’ve been coding in rust, go, and zig ever since ChatGPT came out.

I think that moment made me value python less. When I think about why, it’s because python became less challenging, and the problem space shrank.

It’s been fun to go back to low-level and remember how computers actually work.

On the other hand duck typing is largely a joke. Letting functions take anything as an argument and then just assuming it's a duck with the methods you want is no way to write a robust system. Performance wise you're boxed into a corner. The slow runtime will have you writing native code in another language, complicating your project. The GIL will have you jumping through hoops to work around.

As an offline data exploration and research tool limited to an individual or a small team, or for writing small utilities, I totally get it. For anything mission critical I'd much rather be in something like Java or C# where the typing situation is stronger, the performance is going to be much better, I have better access to threads if I need them, the reasons for dropping into native code are fewer, and the cross platform support works more seamlessly without additional layers like Docker.

With no real recent experience (I fell deep down the hole into C/kernel etc), I wouldn't have any authority to judge how it's adapted to time. But the most common complaint I've observed at companies of all size and sophistication is "the deployment story is a disaster". But it also seems like uv allows people to do all the "I want this specific version of such and such and I don't want $OS to know about any of this" well?

Re math/ai it's an interesting comment because a language is one part the syntax/stuff you receive, and one part the community that tells you to do things a certain way. I'd guess that Python has become such a big tent it is a little hard to enforce norms that other languages seem to have. This somewhat reminds me of Bjarne Stroustrup discussing scaling/evolving a language.

Best of all with this approach, is that what is in the standard library suffices, no need to mess up with venvs, PYTHONPATH, or whatever is the current trend.

I love reading comments like this because it just makes me feel good about my job security.

You are aware that things like Youtube and Uber back ends all run on Python, right?

But it seemed like a lot of people overlooked why it was loved. Most of us weren't wishing that our 2k+ line projects were all written in it.

Those little 20-500 line scripts were just so much more fun in Python than anything else though, and it showed up in survey after survey.

Then came Python 3 and it just never felt the same. PyQT projects faltered. Deps split. Strings broke.

However I started using Nim a few years back which has given me that Python 2 feeling – except with static types, better overall language design, meta-programming, and performance!

But this seems like an apples to oranges comparison. Yes, of course a few scripts are very different than "something largeish" written in Python

  >>> from __future__ import braces 
    File "<python-input-2>", line 1
      from __future__ import braces 
                             ^^^^^^
  SyntaxError: not a chance

    import antigravity

Processors and memory have gotten cheap enough were development speed matters more than compute cost.

Why is this absurd? What are you writing where you need to scrape this sort of performance, but are perfectly fine with the overhead of interpreting bytecode at runtime, heap-allocating objects to represent floating-point numbers, not having homogeneous-type arrays that can store their elements contiguously in memory but which must indirect them, etc. etc. etc.?

Alternately, what world are you living in where everything a program does is CPU-bound and must be done efficiently? In this world, what led you to examine or try Python in the first place?

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#admired-and...