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Comment by systems | Hacker News Reader

Python is a very widely used language, and like any popular thing, yes many many many like it , and many many many dislike it .. it is that big, python can be disliked by a million developer and still be a lot more liked than disliked

but i also think that its true that python is not and have not been for a while considered as a modern or technically advanced language

the hype currently is for typed or gradually typed languages, functional languages, immutable data , system languages, type safe language, language with advanced parallelism and concurrency support etc ..

python is old , boring OOP, if you like it, than like millions of developers you are not picky about programming language, you use what works, what pays

but for devs passionate about programming languages, python is a relic they hope vanish

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Python is designed to be "boring" (in other words, straightforward and easy to understand). It is admittedly less so, now that it has gained many features since the 2.x days, but it is still part of its pedigree that it is supposed to be teachable as a beginner language.

It is still the only beginner language that is also an industrial-strength production language. You can learn Python as your first language and also make an entire career out of it. That can't really be said about the currently "hyped" languages, even though those are very fun and cool and interesting!

> but for devs passionate about programming languages, python is a relic they hope vanish

If you asked me what language I would consider to be a relic that I hope would vanish, I'd go with Perl.

> but for devs passionate about programming languages, python is a relic they hope vanish

Such devs are increasingly rare and, in some domains, almost nonexistent. For example, Kotlin borrowed a lot of nice features from Scala and Groovy, yet 99% of Kotlin code I've seen professionally never touched those features. Kotlin on Android seems to be overwhelmingly written by barely (or not at all) re-trained Java devs; moreover, those who never learned anything more recent than 1.8 (at least they know what lambdas are.)

In short, it's not about the language; it's about the people who use that language. Wishing a language to vanish is misguided - it wouldn't change anything. The people would just switch to the next language and would still program in the same style. You can write Fortran in every language - this is as true today as it was back in the 70s, but the percentage of people who can't be bothered to stop writing Fortran (metaphorically, in more literal meaning their first language, whatever it was) even after changing to another language got much higher. IMO due to the changes in how programming as a trade is perceived in society... but that's perhaps a rant for another time :)

i really like this opinion, a large percentage of developers write procedural code in any language, libraries and market demand is their main decision criteria, not language features

> the hype currently is for typed or gradually typed languages

So Python with mypy

> devs passionate about programming languages, python is a relic they hope vanish

Statements like this are obviously untrue for large numbers of people, so I'm not sure of the point you're trying to make.

But certainly it's true that there are both objective and subjective reasons for using a particular tool, so I hope you are in a position to use the tools that you prefer the most. Have a great day!

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