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Comment by lunias | Hacker News Reader

Python at number 1 makes me cringe... In my experience, Python is not a language that I would use for anything other than a script or some solo PoC. I would absolutely never use it on code expected to exceed 1000 lines, code that's maintained by more than one person, or code that takes more than a few seconds to run. Python has a lot of great libraries as a result of it being the language of choice to teach non software engineers at university. A lot of smart people contribute to the ecosystem, but I wish they would focus their efforts elsewhere. Preferably pick any complied, strongly typed, static language that supports multi-threading.

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Same. I strictly use it for scripting. Was messing around with ML stuff last year and hated it so much I gave up after a month.

Don't understand why Ruby is so much less popular. Seems like Python is de facto "first language" (it was for me), but I would advocate for Ruby.

Libraries. RoR did swing some attention to Ruby, but it's not the first thing that comes up in almost any context. It almost comes up in no context at all except if people are asked what scripting language they like in general. Python comes up all the time and you probably have it installed already as it comes with the OS.

I couldn’t agree more. It feels “squishy” to me. The only statically typed, compiler languages I have a lot of familiarity with are Rust, C, and C++, and they all have different sort of warts.

C with some sort of module system and the tooling of Rust would be really nice.

I'm a longtime Java dev that gets tossed on Python projects from time to time. Python for fun stuff at home is great, but in enterprise it's a waste of time. It cannot be overstated the value of compiler assisted debugging when working in a codebase that you did not write. I even find just reading code in Python difficult, when people don't use types I'm forced to interrogate stuff more closely and keep more stuff in my head (because it's explicitly not written down). People will say that, "you can use mypy for type checking." That's great, if you're working on a project where they started with that from the beginning. I'd prefer something that useful to not be optional. Even if you manage to write some super clean, type-checked Python it will still be way slower to execute than if you chose almost any compiled language. In the event that you need more performance and want to scale out (multiple core processors are kinda a thing these days) then you're forced to use a multi-process paradigm because of the GIL.

People will also say, "Python is productivity gains because it's the easiest to write," but it's only the easiest to write because you know it the best.

Yeah the syntax is awful. It might work well, but it's no fun to code in.

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