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Comment by swannodette | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that people clamor for a language feature that doesn't work well if you don't have:

  1) Cheap immutable data structures

  2) Excellent language support for managing mutable state

  3) A sophisticated VM designed around concurrency (parallel GC)

Python has none of these. Getting rid of GIL won't make parallel programming in Python any easier. It'll just show you how hard it really is.

The other option is to adopt a language that does provide these things. I can think of a new Lisp that celebrates pragmatism over purism that fits the bill pretty well...

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People don't want to learn, work, strive, experiment, or otherwise do anything that doesn't involve having the world handed to them on a platter.

A lot of people use Python because it was batteries included, because everything you ever wanted was already done and made for you. I work in Python on a daily basis, but I cringe regularly at the #python channel on Freenode and the kinds of people the language attracts.

Python, quite simply, attracts people who don't want to code or learn anything.

Those aren't the kinds of people who are going to learn Clojure, sadly.

Rubyists, god bless them, are a little more adventurous, for better or worse.

The same, if not worse, can be said for PHP - where I came from. I've been a casual Python user for some time and a serious Python programmer for the last six months; the Python community is a godsend in comparison with that of PHP's.

Granted, there are helpful and genius people in both communities but there is a larger share of "muggles" in the PHP camp due it's low barrier to entry (everyone wants a website!).

"Python, quite simply, attracts people who don't want to code or learn anything." should be rephrased as "Python, quite simple, attracts people who don't want language to stand in their way." What you are commenting is harsh and does not really apply in general.

This type of generalization are what language wars are made of.

Actively answer all questions that you can in #python for two weeks. 6-pack if you can do it without groaning to yourself.

Actively answer all questions you can in #popular-project for two weeks. 6-pack if you can do it without groaning to yourself.

Downvoters, yeah he is harse but he still has a point - Python is famous for coming with batteries included so it is not unreasonably assume that the people whom it attracts are those who want a language like that.

But he is wrong with those people not wanting to learn Clojure: since it runs on the JVM, you can use any Java library to do what you want. I doubt there are as many libraries for Python as there are for Java.

That's not really fair. A lot of Pythonistas are also quite strong Haskell, Scheme, or even Clojure programmers. On their own time. But the nice thing about Python is that they can also get paid to write it.

The part about the GIL that I hate is that it directly affects my ability to use Python for work. There's a good chance that a Python-based system that I love will be replaced with Java because the GIL simply isn't workable in a multithreaded environment, and there're a bunch of other engineering reasons why the system really should be multithreaded. I don't suffer any GIL-related problems in my personal programming, because my hobby projects simply don't get to the scale where it matters. But most of my hobby hacking is in Haskell anyway.

What's the use case at work that's making it unworkable - just curious.

That's a tenuous link you're making there, about Python being batteries included, and so therefore attracting people who suck.

A perhaps more credible generalization would be - as a language becomes more popular, more and more people that 'you' cannot stand would appear. Attributing such phenomena to the language's innate features ... well you'd probably need to spend more time justifying that claim before we may accept it as true.

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