Ask HN: Why use Python?

Short answer: Python is the best high-level, general purpose language. It's got a good following in web apps and APIs, data processing and research, and many other fields, as well as being the language of choice for many glue code projects and as a modern alternative to bash scripts.

I wrote a post that was popular on HN a few years ago thinking out loud about what Python is good at which received several comments on areas I missed too. The link in the HN thread [1] is dead but you can find the post at [2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9524607

[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20161101070610/http://lisnr.com/b...

It's mature. The community is mature (in multiple senses of the word). The ecosystem is mature. The package management is solid. There are drivers or SDKs for basically every tool or service I would want to interface with.

The syntax is rich but concise. It doesn't require compilation of binaries. It does OOP pretty well. It does procedural pretty well. It does web pretty well. It does throwaway command line scripts pretty well. It does performance well enough for the things I do with it. It's portable.

Python isn't perfect, but 99.99% of the time it gets out of my way. I must, can, and do work with other languages. I constantly find them frustrating me in small ways. Python generally doesn't do that.

Because I'm told to for school.

It looks like a general pseudocode, even someone unfamiliar with the language can read it and usually understand what's going on.

I try to avoid it for new programs though, as the life of the sane language version (Python 2) is going to end at some point.