Comment by BiteCode_dev

Python has many issues that are quite clear when you operate at some kind of scale and need proper multiprocessing/multithreading support. And its not just the GIL, you get very unexpected behaviors when dealing with exit handlers and signal handlers in edge cases. Having seen what other languages look like it just doesn’t feel like a language that was designed well for running at scale.

The tooling has markedly improved though. Things like typing and compile time checks, great. But its also funny to me that some of the fastest tools for python are being built in rust (eg uv).

I’ve always found Python to be sort of loved on HN. Not by everyone or course but I guess it depends on each of our experiences on here. I’m usually rather surprised when I meet people who genuinely dislike Python, because that seems like such an odd occurrence. Even if people don’t “love” the language most people seem to have had rather fond experiences or memories of it. Usually criticism comes down to its inefficiencies, but those aren’t exactly unreasonable critiques.

As I said it’s anecdotal, but in my experience Python gets a lot of love compared to something like Java or C#. Both of which are often met with real harshness. Hell I’ve ranted unseemly about C# myself.

My only big critism is the CPython folks resistance to any kind of performance improvements, and the way PyPy efforts have been largely ignored, making Python the last major dynamic language to finally start caring about performance and having a JIT in the box.

Finally thanks to data science, and people getting fed up with always writing bindings, this is changing, and Python can join Common Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, SELF, JavaScript, Ruby, Lua, Dylan, Julia, BASIC club.

I mean, even on HN, I'd say if there's derision, it's mostly one uttered with a yawn rather than genuine hate. And that's almost justified; while I spend a lot of my time with lots of different languages (I can't think of a single one I outright hate btw), Python is the one that pays for my things and... Well, there's not much drama there is there (now that we're lost 2->3 anyway)? It's a glue language that's easy to learn, but offers tons of depth should you want it. My primary annoyance at Python used to be the typing, but type annotations have made this less of an issue. It's a nice language and you can do almost everything with it. It's a bit boring, but I guess that's a good thing.

The people disliking the language might also be the people that love it. I know I am in that camp.

It is a great language in many ways, that's why its shortcomings are so painful.