Ask HN: Why use Python?

I use Python because of the people who made it what it is today. The community is what I like most about Python.

I'm bootstrapping, taking a one-man army approach to creating a new service. I chose a mature language with features and open source projects I may possibly want or need along the way. I am working alone -- not by preference but rather necessity -- and knew I would need help along the way (started very green, 4 years ago). The Python standard library and open source ecosystem offers everything and more than I may ever need to create my vision. The Python community is really strong. It's a global movement. I've gotten so much help on IRC! Stack overflow always has an answer or a legion ready to answer practically anything Python related. Years of Python related blog posts are a google search away from access. PSF-supported Python conferences release or at least try to release video recordings of talks (cough.. ehem..). As for conferences? PyCon has been the ooey gooey salted caramel center of the perfect vanilla pint.

jupyter. nothing beats a repl in a web page for instant feedback and iteration.

>as the life of the sane language version (Python 2) is going to end at some point.

Don't hold your breath for that. There are tens (hundreds?) of millions of Python code in production that's nobody ever gonna port, and that people will still support well into 2040.

The wide number of things it enables: data science & machine learning, web apps & APIs, simple scripts, and it doesn't trip beginners up with extra syntax.

It fits in my head. Its concepts are simple but orthogonal and extremely powerful. It doesn't ask me to take up complicated abstractions in order to do complicated things.

There's a library for everything out there.

I have never seen a language with greater uniformity of styles and idioms, with those style choices being right the vast majority of the time. You generally know what to expect, and I spend little time fighting with bugs or surprising behaviors.

For the things where its performance is unsatisfactory, it offers escape hatches. The tooling is good; there's better out there but I rarely find myself yearning for more than ipdb.

For scientific computing, it's simply top notch. I can't see myself using anything else for doing my data analysis until you're pushing the limits of performance.

Tracebacks are clear. Unlike JS, I know exactly where a piece of code is failing.

It lets you break rules when you need it to but it makes it obvious and the cultural pressure to not do it is high. Out of all the dynamically typed languages I know it'd the one I feel most comfortable pushing until the point where you need stronger validation.