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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

"If you learn to like Python, you will learn to hate other languages."

I think it would be more accurate to say that if you learn other languages, you'll learn not to hate Python. Python is kind of mediocre in a lot of ways, but it's the only language without any deal breakers.

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Clojure also lacks deal breakers. Python was my least hated language until Clojure.

For some people the JVM is a deal breaker. I can't say it's a deal breaker for me, but I do understand some of that sentiment.

You can't write command line tools in any JVM language because of that long startup and warmup period, and you're always going to suffer from excessive memory consumption.

Also, lack of easy access to C/C++ code is problematic for some types of software.

I agree it's not wonderful for command-line tools. We're writing a fairly large app with it (everything behind https://circleci.com). Instead of single-run command line tools, you write functions that you call from the REPL. Took me a while to get used to it, but it's pretty great once you switch over.

The Clojure language is great, but the dependency on the Java ecosystem and the JVM are deal breakers for me.

Why? To be honest, I used to think that, but then I actually tried it and haven't had any problems there.

If you’re working on embedded code, the overhead for something like the JVM could easily be prohibitive because of the size.

And if you’re working on anything that needs to do a small job quickly, such as command line tools as fauigerzigerk mentioned, the overhead for something like the JVM will almost certainly be prohibitive because of the delay at start-up.

In that case, maybe you should give Racket a try? http://racket-lang.org/

> it's the only language without any deal breakers

Interesting thought. Can you elaborate?

You can use it to make websites, do scientific computing, NLP, email processing, datamining, big data, etc. If you're just trying to throw up a website then Ruby or Javascript are fine, but if your backend involves lots of different types of computing then Python is pretty much your only option. So if you have an idea for a minimum viable product but you don't really know where you want to take it two or three years down the road, then it really just seems like the most pragmatic option.

True, but it has to be said that for NLP, scientific computing and datamining, Python is used as a job control or glue language. The actual algorithms can't be written in Python and that is Python's biggest drawback for me.

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