Yeah brother, down with Big Python!

I work in a chemistry research field. Most people I know run Python programs for their research. No one I know uses Go. I only know a handful who use Java. Rust and Julia are oddities that appear occasionally.

Sure, we have very different experiences. But that also means that unless you can present strong survey data, it's hard to know if your "Most people" is limited to the people you associate with, or is something more broadly true.

The PSF overlap with my field is essentially zero. I mean, I was that overlap, but I stopped being involved with the PSF about 8 years ago when my youngest was born and I had no free time or money. In the meanwhile, meaningful PSF involvement became less something a hobbyist project and something more corporatized .. and corporate friendly.

> scientists (who buy expensive training courses)

ROFL!! What scientists are paying for expensive training courses?!

I tried selling training courses to computational chemists. It wasn't worth the time needed to develop and maintain the materials. The people who attended the courses liked them, but the general attitude is "I spent 5 years studying <OBSCURE TOPIC> for my PhD, I can figure out Python on my own."

> who are force fed Python at university

shrug I was force fed Pascal, and have no idea if Wirth was a nice person.

> main reason for its popularity in machine learning

I started using Python in the 1990s both because of the language and because of the ease of writing C extensions, including reference counting gc, since the C libraries I used had hidden data dependencies that simple FFI couldn't handle.

I still use the C API -- direct, through Cython, and through FFI -- and I don't do machine learning.

> If it is so popular, why the booster articles?

It's an article about a company which sells a Python IDE. They do it to boost their own product.

With so many people clearly using Python, why would they spend time boosting something else?

It's syntactically strong.

AFAIK, it's the preferred language for lots of leetcode, e.g. Advent of Code. The practical expressivity and speed of dev is strong.

JavaScript is like that. C++ was kinda like that. I think "Popularity among novices" is the only thing that determines whether a language will succeed or fail in the long term (say, 20 years)

I treat it pretty much like bash. it's good for scripts. and it's great for serverless tasks like running as an AWS lambda. if you want to run some simple script that queries a DB and/or hits an API on a schedule or triggered by an event, Python is arguably the best way to do that because the handler and interpreter work so well together. even still, you'd get better performance with Node.

I don't like Python for "applications" as much. I was at a place almost 10 years ago now that had Python "microservices" running in Kubernetes. managing performance and dependencies for Python in production is just unnecessarily futile compared to something like Go that's also very accessible syntactically.

> Students are taught it, a bunch of libraries were written for it, now everyone keeps using it.

This is revisionism.

When I was in school, that's what people would say about C/C++/Java.

People like me switched to Python well before it became common to teach it at school. Lots of great libraries were written in it before then as well. I mean, it's really easy to write a library in it than it was in most other languages.

It was picked for teaching in schools because it was a decent language, and was already widespread. It's much more useful to teach Python to an average engineering student than C/C++/Java.

It became popular because it was easy to learn, and a lot nicer to use than the other big scripting language: Perl. When I was in grad school, I would routinely find non-engineers and non-programmers using it for their work, as well as writing libraries for their peers. There is no way they would have done that in any of the prevailing languages of the time - many of them learned to program while in grad school. It became quite popular amongst linguists. Then NumPy/SciPy became a popular alternative to MATLAB, and once again my peers, who would never write C++ to do their work, were suddenly getting matching speed by using Python. That's how it ended up being the language for ML.

So no - the fact that it's taught in schools is not the reason it's used today.

> Python itself is slow

Slow is relative. You need to account for the time to write as well, and amortize over the number of times the code is run. For code that is run once, writing time dominates. Writing a Java equivalent of half of the things you can do in Python would be a nightmare.

Care to give some examples of those trivial things you’re fighting?

Tesla's dashboard is not simple. Having a touchscreen for everything instead of physical buttons is a travesty.

It's easy to forget how big Perl was before the 10 Year Stall happened. (I.e. when development on Perl 5 was stalled in wait for Perl 6 which never happened. By the time Perl 6 was renamed to Raku, it was too late for Perl 5. It now lives on, but it lost a lot of momentum.)

> Python is never the best language to do it in, but is almost always the second-best language to do it in.

I've been writing python from the last century and this year is the first time I'm writing production quality python code, everything up to this point has been first cut prototypes or utility scripts.

The real reason why it has stuck to me while others came and went is because of the REPL-first attitude.

A question like

    >>> 0.2 + 0.1 > 0.3

    True

is much harder to demonstrate in other languages.

The REPL isn't just for the code you typed out, it does allow you to import and run your lib functions locally to verify a question you have.

It is not without its craziness with decorators, fancy inheritance[1] or operator precedence[2], but you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

[1] - __subclasshook__ is crazy, right?

[2] - you can abuse __ror__ like this https://notmysock.org/blog/hacks/pypes

  Welcome to Rakudo™ v2025.06.1.
  Implementing the Raku® Programming Language v6.d.
  Built on MoarVM version 2025.06.
  
  To exit type 'exit' or '^D'
  [0] > 0.1 + 0.2 > 0.3
  False

It's a beautiful and expressive language, and I use it a lot. My only gripe is how prone it is to bit rot, too sensitive to version changes in libraries or runtimes. It needs frequent babysitting if you want to keep everything updated.

Even if it's less secure, the beauty of Go, a single, static binary impervious to version changes, is very appealing for small projects you don't want to keep returning to for housekeeping.

I have written a not inconsiderable amount of Python. But the problem I found was that I spent too much time debugging runtime issues and I do not enjoy that. I found that while it took longer to write correct Rust to solve problems I wanted solving, I enjoyed that so it was a better deal.

Python original purpose was as a scripting language for Amoeba. Yes, it was strongly influenced by ABC, an introduction programming language which van Rossum helped implement, but that was a different language.

https://docs.python.org/3/faq/general.html#why-was-python-cr...

""I was working in the Amoeba distributed operating system group at CWI. We needed a better way to do system administration than by writing either C programs or Bourne shell scripts, since Amoeba had its own system call interface which wasn't easily accessible from the Bourne shell. My experience with error handling in Amoeba made me acutely aware of the importance of exceptions as a programming language feature.

It occurred to me that a scripting language with a syntax like ABC but with access to the Amoeba system calls would fill the need."""

I think you got it backwards: Python was used in ML and data science because it was already one of the preferred languages. A single line can do the work of whole functions in other languages, while remaining clear.

Also, the tooling is abundant and of great quality, it made it the logical choice.

He stepped back and now we have the walrus operator.

At least we don't have to use it.