Breaking up with Python

It depends what you're comparing them against. Python's style of documentation - for the language itself and for many of the popular libraries that follow the same style - is mostly reference material and often incomplete. It's very lacking in examples of usage. It almost completely ignores types. It often doesn't appear in search engine results for relevant keywords leading to spending several minutes brute force searching the official docs site to find something that should have been a 10 second search. Perhaps the most obvious comparison is with the JavaScript/TypeScript world, which has embraced both types and different kinds of documentation and as a result gives a much better developer experience in those areas today.

The standard library in Python is strange because it has a lot of content but much of that content just isn't very good. Entire packages in the standard library are largely ignored in favour of some de facto standard package from PyPI that does the same job much better. Some of the packages for working with different protocols and file formats are useful in the right circumstances but they're so slow that they're not suitable for many applications and again you end up pulling in a better alternative. Meanwhile common data structures and algorithms that you might look for in any modern language's toolbox are scarce to non-existent and the ones that do exist don't always compose easily.

Ruby has been actively stripping the stdlib, moving libraries to default and bundled gems.

Go was pretty expressly aimed at the spot where, at the time, Python was seen as too inefficient but C++ was seen as too much complexity.

It would be swell if rationalizing the packaging story were a priority for 3.12.

If you want to only write/use PS - then probably, but... if this is yours environment - you chose the tools, if it's not - the overall concepts and workflow doesn't differs too much, especially for Python.

I had an unpleasant experience of rewriting a Python 2 script to Python 3. At some point I just said "fuck it" and rewrote it, from scratch, on Linux, with .NET SNMP library - and I got a working script in an hour, compared to 3 days of headache with a known good Py2 script which I only needed to adapt to Py3.

The difference was in the quirks of Python (especially on strong typing and indentation), not in the program flow.

Later I finished rewriting it in Py3 but the overall experience of writing in Python left a sour taste.

A person who would start with PS could easily adapt to Python (or honestly any other language) if he would understand how the things work - and PS allows, IMNSHO, that in a quick and easy way.

But if someone just copy-paste the code from SE - does it matters if that happens in Python or PS?

> so what if it is easy to autocomplete? It doesn't make it any less ugly/verbose

LOL, "I need a PL what is easy for a beginner, so I would NOT recommend an explicitly verbose language for that!"?

a) easiness of autocomplete allows the discoverability of the options. Just a simple Ctrl+Space offers all the options of a cmdlet (conveniently listing them with the precedence used by the author, leaving all the automatic shit added by cmdletbinding() at the end) and this alone helps tremendously with writing. I don't keep all the things, options and parameters in my head (and I don't want to) and a beginner doesn't know them in the first place.

Most of the time I just write something and see if the are means to do what I want through the autocompletion of parameters and cmdlets. If I don't see the appropriate things or they don't work as I expect them to work - only then I consult with manual. If in your opinion nobody should write a single LOC without a couple of hours in the docs...

b) I often hear about how the verboseness of PS as bad thing, but... honestly, IMO, it doesn't matter, it's not THAT verbose as Java, it's not full of obscure and senseless abbreviations and names (especially compared to Linux CLI) and if you compare the actual similar code.. it's not that big difference in LOC and line length. Oh, and you don't reinvent the wheel each time you need to have a working help and argument parsing *smirk*.

c) are we still on the "PL for a beginner" topic? For a carpenter microscope is just a very bad hammer.

> difference of opinion

Let's get back to "PL for a beginner". Between Python and PS the latter would win just because it has a better IDE/autocomplete and has automagik on a lot of things what would drive a beginner mad in Python (oh god, just calling an external binary and capturing it's output...)

PS, as an anecdata: I have a friend who can write some Java, for util level things. I've seen his PS code - he treats PS as a full fledged PL (which again - isn't a bad thing, just not the best way to spend your time writing PS scripts). I doubt he wrote anything in Python, but of what I saw in his PS code means he would have no problems (well, except strong typing and indentation, LOL) writing something in Python.