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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

I wrote plenty of big projects in Python. It works very well, the problems and solutions you have are just different that in other languages you are used to.

The question is more about "what kind of problem do you want to have and what price are you willing to pay to solve them ?". After that, choose the tech that matches this wish.

For me the iteration speed, the ease of adding new members and the flexibility are key.

But what I discovered is that most people just code bad Python and say they have problems, just like most people write bad C/java/whatever and blame the language.

You are supposed to writte Python in a certain way, like any language, to scale.

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It is of course possible to build a great large product in Python, just like it is possible to do so in whatever your least favorite language is. But I'd argue there is more discipline needed to do so than there is in other languages with more type checking and there are whole classes of errors you simply wouldn't have to worry about.

I have not really found this to be the case. I work daily on a codebase of a few hundred thousand lines of Python code with a hundred dependencies and type errors are usually solved quickly.

For small, local needs to pass around data, a plain dict or tuple usually suffices. If you need stricter contracts, you define good classes and interfaces.

There's a need for discipline in your coding style, but I've frankly not found this to be an issue with moderately competent coders who understand this. Yes, you can shoot yourself in the foot with this, but if anything those bugs are usually obvious and solved in the first pass of testing.

> I work daily on a codebase of a few hundred thousand lines of Python code with a hundred dependencies and type errors are usually solved quickly.

Yeah, but they're often solved after the code goes into production and doesn't work, rather than before the code is ever committed.

"Language X allows you to be more undisciplined" doesn't sound like a great selling point for those languages.

Would you perhaps mind giving your opinion of Ruby?

I had the choice between Ruby and Python years ago. I choose Python because of the community, not the language. They are more or less equivalent, although I prefer forced indentation.

Nowaday, ruby is dying in his RoR and Japan niches so the question is moot.

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