When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination. I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)
I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
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Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#192When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination. I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)
> Is this just junior devs who never learned it Seems more like it's fallen out of favor with senior devs who have moved to Go/Rust.
JavaScript has much more intuitive async syntax, which was actually borrowed from a Python framework.
For whatever reasons, the Python folks decided not to build on what they had, and reinvents things from scratch.
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#193When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination. I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)
I have had a somewhat unearned distaste for Python for the last decade or so. I mostly just don’t like some of the design decisions it made. I don’t like that lambdas can’t span multiple lines, I don’t like how slow loops are, I don’t like some functions seem to mutate lists and others don’t, and I am sure that there are other things I missed. But it really comes down to the fact that my career hasn’t used it much. I…
msedit main.py && ./main.py
!!
!!
But indeed, pressing F5 solves that for both Rust and PythonRe: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#194When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination. I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)
Yes, I'd say Python's crown as the go-to lightweight scripting and web development language was mostly ceded to JS. It's still reigning champion of data science, and of course it has a huge number of uses and users still around, but it's not really cool or in vogue outside of those circles.
This is a wild take. You're never going to get a fully accurate measurement but every source I've seen[0][1][2] puts Python as the most common programming language by a country mile.
If it doesn't seem "cool" or "in vogue", that's because everyone is already using it.
[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ [1] https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html#google_vignette [2] https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/upskilling/top-pr...
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#195> Not only because the syntax is more human-friendly, but also because the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros That's kind of very optimistic evaluation - literally anything beyond "import json" will likely lead you into the abyss of virtual envs. Running something created with say Python 3.13.x on Ubuntu 22.04 or even 24.04 (LTSs) / Rocky 9 and the whole can of worms opened. things like vir…
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#196> Not only because the syntax is more human-friendly, but also because the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros That's kind of very optimistic evaluation - literally anything beyond "import json" will likely lead you into the abyss of virtual envs. Running something created with say Python 3.13.x on Ubuntu 22.04 or even 24.04 (LTSs) / Rocky 9 and the whole can of worms opened. things like vir…
I have a silly theory that I only half joke about that docker/containers wouldn't've ever taken off as fast as it did if it didn't solve the horrible python dependency hell so well. You know something is bad when fancy chrooting is the only ergonomic way of shipping something that works. My first taste of Python was as a sysadmin, back in 2012 or so, installing a service written in Python on a server. The dependency…
uv is _much_ better than what came before. As someone who has only had only glancing contact with Python throughout my career (terrible experiences at jobs with conda and pip), uv feels like Python trying to actually join the 21st century of package management. It's telling that it's in Rust and clearly takes inspiration from Cargo, which itself took inspiration from Ruby and Bundler.
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#197Just a small note on the code in the linked script: API_KEY = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_API_KEY") CHANNEL_ID = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID") if not API_KEY or not CHANNEL_ID: print("Missing YOUTUBE_API_KEY or YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID.") exit(1) Presenting the user with "Missing X OR Y" when there's no reason that OR has to be there massively frustrates the user for the near zero benefit of having one fewer if statemen…
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#198Python as a language is nice. Python's version and package management is nothing short of a nightmare.
It's just HN users are more likely to be that somebody else. Probably we have to deal with non-python dependencies anyway so we're reaching for bigger hammers like docker or nix. It would be nice if there wasn't a mess of python package managers, but whichever one I use ends up being a somewhat unimportant middle-layer anyway.
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I'd say Python's crown as the go-to lightweight scripting and web development language was mostly ceded to JS. It's still reigning champion of data science, and of course it has a huge number of uses and users still around, but it's not really cool or in vogue outside of those circles.
Do people really turn to JS (instead of Python) for lightweight scripting? Are we talking about the "better Bash" use case?
The famous answer.... _it depends_.
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#200When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination. I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)