Python is the most popular programming language and beloved by many. However I can’t understand why (this is still the case in 2024).

Here are my main gripes with it:

  • It is slow, performance intensive tasks have to be offloaded to other languages, which makes it complicated to analyse. Moreover I wonder how many kwH could have been saved if programms were written in more performant languages. (and there are better alternatives out there)
  • The missing type system makes it easy to make errors, and the missing compiler makes it hard to catch them
  • It has no linear algebra built in, so you always have to convert things to numpy arrays, which is quite annoying
  • Managing virtual environments and pip packages feels overly complicated

I guess much comes down to personal, but I just can’t understand the love for python.

  • @scharf_2x40OP
    2•9 months ago

    Python is strongly typed, but dynamically checked. Working with other languages I just found, that the type errors in python are the hardest to catch and to debug, but maybe I am just more used to othet languages

    I see it’s use as language to write small scripts, I just don’t see much use besides that.

    Here is a article talking about the speed of compiled python vs Julia. I don’t see why it is better to go to all these extra steps just to end up with something slower. https://www.matecdev.com/posts/julia-python-numba-cython.html