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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, Python is one of the least productive programming languages for projects with more than 3 people. If you have a big project, you are going to spend a lot more time reading code than writing it. Python is write-optimized.

By contrast, using Rust makes it easy to force a readable coding style on yourself and others.

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Python is not readable to you? The beginner friendly, whitespace-enforcing, almost-like-pseudocode-in-English language - that Python? - is not readable enough, but Rust, where you liberally sprinkle ', {}, !, &, :: or #[] everywhere _is_ readable to you? You must be trolling.

You know what Rust looks like to me? Perl without the dollar signs. There's your write-only language, you just have it backwards.

Being able to understand the syntax and by implication being able to understand a single piece of code in front of your eyes doesn't mean you will understand what it actually does. If you're talking about a small piece of code mainly using well known APIs, maybe you will understand it perfectly. But with code calling custom functions in a big codebase? Even when looking at a simple function call in a class:

- if it calls a function on `self`, where is it actually implemented?

- if you pass arguments, can they be mutated?

- can the function throw an exception?

you can't really answer this questions easily and I would argue answering them in Rust is much easier. Also because tooling for statically typed languages can derive much more than for dynamically typed languages.

Surface syntax is the most subjective aspect of a programming language, but Rust uses just a few symbols in a very consistent way. It's nothing like Perl. The indentation rule is nice for small examples, but it tends to break down in cases that are even slightly complex. Which is why, e.g. Haskell can use semicolons and curly braces as an alternative.

In terms of parsing, sure, Python may be slightly simpler. In terms of mentally interpreting the code? Absolutely Rust wins.

How does pattern matching looks like in Python? No, not 3.10 :-) The 99% of Python code that I have to read at a random company is barely 3.7

Wait what? Python, if anything, has a reputation for being readable! Perhaps this is more of a criticism of dynamically typed languages in general? As the team grows, adding mypy types can help a lot.

Personally, it's the scoping that drives me nuts more than the weird version of dynamic typing (which is awful, but can be fixed). A lot of "pythonic" syntax is also very python-specific and hard to read if you aren't a python person. There is also the implicit type conversion and the runtime errors for things a linter or a compiler would catch in another language.

If you only work on <1000 line scripts, Python is a blast. If you work on projects with >1M LoC, it gets very hard to keep everything you need in your head if you want to understand code that other people have written.

Absolutely agree. I've wasted hours trying to deduce the data types being passed around in Python when this takes milliseconds in other languages. My steadfast rule: if a team is using Python, I don't join that team.

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