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Python is really shaping up to be the lingua franca of programming languages. Its adoption is soaring in this FOSS renaissance and I think it's the closest thin

Python is really shaping up to be the lingua franca of programming languages. Its adoption is soaring in this FOSS renaissance and I think it's the closest thing to a golden hammer that we've ever had. The PEP model is a good vehicle for self-improvement and standardization. Packaging and deployment will soon be solved problems thanks to projects such as uv and BeeWare, and I'm confident that we're going to see continued performance improvements year over year.

silisili 1y ago
> Packaging and deployment will soon be solved problems I really hope you're right. I love Python as a language, but for any sufficiently large project, those items become an absolute nightmare without something like Docker. And even with, there seems to be multiple ways people solve it. I wish they'd put something in at the language level or bless an 'official' one. Go has spoiled me there.
- horsawlarway 1y ago
  Honestly, I'm still incredibly shocked at just how bad Python is on this front. I'm plenty familiar with packaging solutions that are painful to work with, but the state of python was shocking when I hopped back in because of the available ML tooling. UV seems to be at least somewhat better, but damn - watching pip literally download 20+ 800MB torch wheels over and over trying to resolve deps only to waste 25GB of bandwidth and finally completely fail after taking nearly an hour was absolutely staggering.
  - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    Python was not taken seriously as something you actually shipped to non-devs. The solution was normally "install the correct version of Python on the host system". In the Linux world, this could be handled through Docker, pyenv. For Windows users, this meant installing a several GB distro and hoping it didn't conflict with what was already on the system.
whycome 1y ago
Would you say Python is a good language to learn as a beginner?
- dpkirchner 1y ago
  Not the person you replied to but I'd say definitely not. It'd be easy to pick up bad habits from python (untyped variables) and try to carry them over to other languages. It's also the king of runtime errors, which will frustrate newbies. I think a compiled language is a better choice for people just getting started. Java is good, IMO, because it is verbose. Eventually the beginner may get tired of the verbosity and move on to something else, but at least they'll understand the value of explicit types and compile-time errors.
  - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    Huh? Python variables definitely have a type. Its just determined at runtime. The only untyped language I know, at least modern ones is assembler. Well and C, if you make everything void*.
- chrisrodrigue 1y ago
  Yeah, definitely. It's basically executable pseudocode and it's really simple for a beginner to pick up and hit the ground running for a variety of use cases. Some people will tell you to start with C or C++ to get a better intuition for what's actually happening under the hood in Python, but that's not really necessary for most use cases unless you're doing something niche. Some of the most popular use cases for Python are webapps, data analysis, or general automation. For the 1% of use cases that Python isn't the right fit for, you can still use it to prototype or glue things together. There are a lot of great resources out there for learning Python, but they won't necessarily teach you how to make great software. You can't go wrong with the official tutorial. https://learn.scientific-python.org/development/ https://learn.scientific-python.org/development/ is pretty terse and incorporates a lot of best practices.
  - somethingsome 1y ago
ergonaught 1y ago
> Packaging and deployment will soon be solved problems ... I hope so. Every time I engage in a "Why I began using Go aeons ago" conversation, half of the motivation was this. The reason I stopped engaging in them is because most of the participants apparently cannot see that this is even a problem. Performance was always the second problem (with Python); this was always the first.
airstrike 1y ago
Python is too high level, slow and duck-typed to even be considered for a huge number of projects. There is no one-size-fits-all programming language.
pjmlp 1y ago
Is the new BASIC, Pascal and Lisp. Now if only CPython also got a world class JIT, V8 style.
int_19h 1y ago
AI-generated code is going to be a major influence going forward. Regardless of how you feel about its quality (I'm a pessimist myself), it's happening anyway, and it's going to cement the dominant position of those languages which LLMs understand / can write the best. Which correlates strongly to their amount in the training set, which means that Python and JavaScript in particular are here to stay now, and will likely be increasingly shoved into more and more niches - even those they aren't well-suited to - solely because LLMs can write them.
screye 1y ago
Never heard of Beeware, but Astral's products have transformed my python workflow (uv, ruff). Is Beeware that transformational ? What does Beeware do and what is its maturity level?
gymbeaux 1y ago
I haven’t run into anything where Python either couldn’t be used or shouldn’t be used, except for the browser of course. I think software engineers with any significant amount of experience recognize you can build an application that does X in just about any language. To me, the largest difference, the greatest factor in which language to choose, is the existing packages. Simple example- there are several packages in Python for extracting text from PDFs (using tesseract or not). C# has maybe one tesseract wrapper? I recall working with PDFs in .NET being a nightmare. I think we had to buy a license to some software because there wasn’t a free offering. Python has several. This is VERY important because we as software engineers, even if we wanted to reinvent the wheel sometimes, have very limited time. It takes an obscene number of man hours to develop a SalesForce or a Facebook or even something smaller like a Linux distro.

silisili 1y ago

> Packaging and deployment will soon be solved problems I really hope you're right. I love Python as a language, but for any sufficiently large project, those items become an absolute nightmare without something like Docker. And even with, there seems to be multiple ways people solve it. I wish they'd put something in at the language level or bless an 'official' one. Go has spoiled me there.

horsawlarway 1y ago
Honestly, I'm still incredibly shocked at just how bad Python is on this front. I'm plenty familiar with packaging solutions that are painful to work with, but the state of python was shocking when I hopped back in because of the available ML tooling. UV seems to be at least somewhat better, but damn - watching pip literally download 20+ 800MB torch wheels over and over trying to resolve deps only to waste 25GB of bandwidth and finally completely fail after taking nearly an hour was absolutely staggering.
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  Python was not taken seriously as something you actually shipped to non-devs. The solution was normally "install the correct version of Python on the host system". In the Linux world, this could be handled through Docker, pyenv. For Windows users, this meant installing a several GB distro and hoping it didn't conflict with what was already on the system.

whycome 1y ago

Would you say Python is a good language to learn as a beginner?

dpkirchner 1y ago
Not the person you replied to but I'd say definitely not. It'd be easy to pick up bad habits from python (untyped variables) and try to carry them over to other languages. It's also the king of runtime errors, which will frustrate newbies. I think a compiled language is a better choice for people just getting started. Java is good, IMO, because it is verbose. Eventually the beginner may get tired of the verbosity and move on to something else, but at least they'll understand the value of explicit types and compile-time errors.
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  Huh? Python variables definitely have a type. Its just determined at runtime. The only untyped language I know, at least modern ones is assembler. Well and C, if you make everything void*.
chrisrodrigue 1y ago
Yeah, definitely. It's basically executable pseudocode and it's really simple for a beginner to pick up and hit the ground running for a variety of use cases. Some people will tell you to start with C or C++ to get a better intuition for what's actually happening under the hood in Python, but that's not really necessary for most use cases unless you're doing something niche. Some of the most popular use cases for Python are webapps, data analysis, or general automation. For the 1% of use cases that Python isn't the right fit for, you can still use it to prototype or glue things together. There are a lot of great resources out there for learning Python, but they won't necessarily teach you how to make great software. You can't go wrong with the official tutorial. https://learn.scientific-python.org/development/ https://learn.scientific-python.org/development/ is pretty terse and incorporates a lot of best practices.
- somethingsome 1y ago

ergonaught 1y ago

> Packaging and deployment will soon be solved problems ... I hope so. Every time I engage in a "Why I began using Go aeons ago" conversation, half of the motivation was this. The reason I stopped engaging in them is because most of the participants apparently cannot see that this is even a problem. Performance was always the second problem (with Python); this was always the first.

airstrike 1y ago

Python is too high level, slow and duck-typed to even be considered for a huge number of projects. There is no one-size-fits-all programming language.

pjmlp 1y ago

Is the new BASIC, Pascal and Lisp. Now if only CPython also got a world class JIT, V8 style.

int_19h 1y ago

AI-generated code is going to be a major influence going forward. Regardless of how you feel about its quality (I'm a pessimist myself), it's happening anyway, and it's going to cement the dominant position of those languages which LLMs understand / can write the best. Which correlates strongly to their amount in the training set, which means that Python and JavaScript in particular are here to stay now, and will likely be increasingly shoved into more and more niches - even those they aren't well-suited to - solely because LLMs can write them.

screye 1y ago

Never heard of Beeware, but Astral's products have transformed my python workflow (uv, ruff). Is Beeware that transformational ? What does Beeware do and what is its maturity level?

gymbeaux 1y ago

I haven’t run into anything where Python either couldn’t be used or shouldn’t be used, except for the browser of course. I think software engineers with any significant amount of experience recognize you can build an application that does X in just about any language. To me, the largest difference, the greatest factor in which language to choose, is the existing packages. Simple example- there are several packages in Python for extracting text from PDFs (using tesseract or not). C# has maybe one tesseract wrapper? I recall working with PDFs in .NET being a nightmare. I think we had to buy a license to some software because there wasn’t a free offering. Python has several. This is VERY important because we as software engineers, even if we wanted to reinvent the wheel sometimes, have very limited time. It takes an obscene number of man hours to develop a SalesForce or a Facebook or even something smaller like a Linux distro.