Python Is Eating the World

As someone with a P.E. license that spent hundreds of hours studying and had to sit for that excruciating 8-hour exam twice, I don't think even 5% of the software developers in the US could pass an equivalent exam. Granted, I think the sector I took it in has a harder test than some, but it is a weed out test for someone that already took 4 years of Engineering school.

Some takeaways from this: 1.) I learned a little bit from studying, but overall even though it was hard, I would've learned a lot more by getting a Master's degree. 2.) The test isn't good at determining if you're good at your job or honestly even minimally competent in your area. For example, even in a specialized field (power systems engineering), there are thousands of diverse jobs (power generation, distribution, electrical contracting, power transmission operations, power transmission planning....etc etc) so the test only had a few questions on my particular area. 3.) There are a lot of amazingly smart people working in software, but the skill range seems to be bigger than in traditional engineering fields where most engineers are fairly similar in skillset (there are some outliers) as they all generally have to pass the same courses if their university is accredited (talking about USA here). In the software world, you have software engineers and computer science doctorates mixed with someone with very little training that is trying to wing it. That means the dataset has a far greater range on skillsets. One employee might have had a class on compilers while another just learned what a for-loop is. In engineering, we generally all show up to the first day of work with the same building blocks (thermo, statics, Dynamics, circuits, differential equations, stats, calculus, basic programming...etc). The only difference between me as a senior engineer and a new hire is 9 years of experience, knowledge of the business and tools and ability to get things done without oversight. It makes a big difference, but I wouldn't expect them to be lacking any of the tools or training that I have picked up (ok...maybe databases).

I'm struggling a bit to convey the overall message that software engineering seems a bit different and licensing would therefore need to be different if done. Perhaps you could have licensing for individual subjects? For example, you could pass a basic test on relational databases where you prove you can do basic operations such as select, where clauses, joins, updates, exports...etc. Then you'd have another to prove you were minimally competent in Java? Would that be of any value to an employer? I don't know. I'm guessing someone already does this for Oracle and Java too.

.NET has always had slow exception handling because it tied/ties in Windows’ Structured Exception Handling (SEH); that’s rather slow but provides e.g. detailed stack traces even for mixed-mode callstacks.

Having ported some decently large codebases from OCaml to F#, the heavy use of exceptions in OCaml (where exceptions are very lightweight by design) had to be changed to normal control flow with monads to achieve good performance in F# — specifically because of .NET’s slow exception handling.

Poetry is just rather new. Give it a few.

Am I correct when I assume that most of the people hating on Python here are using it for medium or big projects?

I feel like the dev community figured this out ages ago: Statically typed languages are easier to read, harder to write, dynamically typed languages are easier to write, harder to read (and also harder to refactor).

For small projects (scripts, prototypes, etc), you don't care about readability, you just want it to be as easy to write as possible. Python really shines here.

For bigger projects, using Python is painful, but that's also the case with pretty much any other dynamic language..

The problem is that when they did the big Python 3 transition they didn't fix the real pain points (with the exception of string types), many of the things they fixed were not a problem, or worse they removed things that were actually useful. Such as the infamous print statement.

So now they can never fix the real problems, because everybody is so traumatised by the Python 3 transition.

I'll also say that the rate of development of Python is incredibly slow, slower than even JavaScript's TC39 if that's possible. I waited my whole Python career to get format string interpolation.