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I felt the opposite, because Python isn’t a great language. It won because of Google, fast prototyping, and its ML interop (e.g. pandas, numpy), but as a language it’s always been subpar.

Indentation is a horrible decision (there’s a reason no other language went this way), which led to simple concepts like blocks/lambdas having pretty wild constraints (only one line??)

Type decoration has been a welcome addition, but too slowly iterated on and the native implementations (mypy) are horribly slow at any meaningful size.

Concurrency was never good and its GIL+FFI story has boxed it into a long-term pit of sadness.

I’ve used it for years, but I’m happy to see it go. It didn’t win because it was the best language.

by zabzonk4 hours ago|

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> there’s a reason no other language went this way)

Except of course for those that did, Haskell, Fortran for example.

by bonesss1 hours ago|

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F# as well, and that tends to exist in parallel with some degree of C# written by the same devs… the indentation enables cleaner, smaller, simpler code function by function.

It’s pretty ok in Python, but meaningful indentation is amazing with a proper type system and compiler. Clean, consistent, efficient, and ensures working code is easily read and standardized.

I’m unaware of anyone accepting improperly formatted C# as ‘done’, and would reject any such PR out of hand because of the potential for legibility issues to hide bugs. So: if it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done by the compiler to save line noise.

by Sohcahtoa8237 minutes ago|

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> lambdas having pretty wild constraints (only one line??)

I will never understand why people are upset about this.

You HAVE multi-line lambdas. They're called functions.

Yeah, I know you want a function that's only used once to be able to be defined in-line, but tbh I've always found that syntax to be pretty ugly, especially once you're passing two functions to a single call, or have additional parameters AFTER the function (I'm looking at you, setTimeout/setInterval).

by groundzeros20154 hours ago|

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I’m always baffled when language complaints come down to syntax

by Ringz1 hours ago|

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That’s exactly how I think, too. But at the same time, I like indentation in Python, because I would logically indent in every other language as well. In fact, I find all those semicolons and similar things at the end of each line completely redundant (why should I repeat myself for something the compiler should do) and I hate them. And that’s despite having experience with Modula and 10 years of C++. But when I look at Rust, I find the syntax simply awful. From an ADHD perspective…

by smallerize2 hours ago|

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Lambdas are intentionally kneecapped in python because Guido van Robson doesn't want to make a functional language. (As in "functional programming", not that it doesn't work.)

by ciupicri2 hours ago|

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Guido van Rossum didn't oppose functional programming, but he wanted to keep the language (and the interpreter) simple.

by smallerize41 minutes ago|

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"I didn't envision Python as a functional language" https://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/04/origins-of-pytho...

"I don't think it makes much sense to try to add "functional" primitives to Python, because the reason those primitives work well in functional languages don't apply to Python, and they make the code pretty unreadable for people who aren't used to functional languages (which means most programmers). I also don't think that the current crop of functional languages is ready for mainstream." https://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/08/25/2115204/inter...

by rplnt4 hours ago|

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AI benefits from tools to verify its halucinations. That's much easier in a typed and compiled language. Then have a language that can't be monkey patched at runtime and the confidence increases even more.

If you mean "easy to get something out of it" then yeah, it's great.

by dkersten4 hours ago|

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Typescript wins in terms of training data IMHO, by which I mean that the training data is large enough that AI does great with TS, and the language is (IMHO) superior to Python in many ways.

I personally now use a mixture of Typescript and Rust for most things, including AI coding. Its been working quite well. (AI doesn't handle Rust as well as TS, in that the code isn't quite idiomatic, but it does ok)

by CuriouslyC3 hours ago|

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It turns out that volume of training data isn't the most important thing. Elixir beats Kotlin and C#, which beat pretty much everything else. Kotlin is probably the sweet spot for most things.

by dkersten2 hours ago|

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Not the most important thing, but it certainly helps.

by lexicality5 hours ago|

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a lot of the training data is either for python 2 or just generally very low quality

by stuaxo5 hours ago|

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The quality issue doesn't seem unique to Python.

The versioning issue I've seen across libraries that version change in many languages.

I don't tend to hit Python 2 issues using LLMs with it, but I do hit library things (e.g. Pydantic likes to make changes between libraries - or loads of the libraries used a lot by AI companies).

by bigfudge3 hours ago|

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I’ve found recent Claude to be much better in this regard. I think a lot rests on the quality of the harness and the work behind the scenes done to RAG up to date docs or search for docs proactively rather than guessing.

I also don’t have issues with quality of Python generated. It takes a bit of nudging to use list comps and generators rather than imperative forms but it tends to mimic code already in context. So if the codebase is ok, it does do better.

by prodigycorp4 hours ago|

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That could be it. I still see LLMs fail a set of static typing challenges that I created a couple years ago as a benchmark. Google models still fail it. I wonder if the lack of typing in a lot of the training data makes python harder to reason about?

by lsbehe5 hours ago|

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The tons of python code would be great training data if there was any consistency across the ecosystem. Yet every project I've touched required me to learn it's unique style. Then I'd imagine they practically poisoned half the training set because python2 is subtly different.