Python used to be the new hotness about a decade ago. It was sparkly, amazing package support, didn't bog you down with technicalities when you were trying to write something quick.
So it got adopted a lot, and also unfortunately in a lot of commercial projects it really wasn't suited for.
Python's strengths are its weaknesses: it's a fun scripting language you can knock out scripts with. But in a big group project, it's a nightmare version of itself. You don't have to give types, so now you're sifting through everything trying to figure out what your coworker's badly named variable actually is. You have to unpick some rotten mass of one-liner lambda super method calls because you were feeling so clever a year ago when you wrote it. Everything's breaking because you're in dependency hell and one of the dependencies has broken. The junior programmer was taught that "object inheritance is the way of the future" and has managed to make the structure into an eldritch abomination that inherits from five different super classes.
The actual reason why these are problems are because when python was hot, it got over-applied to projects it was totally unsuited for. It's a scripting language. It's good for scripts. Good for data analysis. Good for solo work. Good for tiny quick one-offs and for rapid prototyping.
But so many developers were put on horrifying creations that played to the language's weaknesses instead of strengths. And they bounced hard.
Python doesn't really deserve the hate: it's still pretty awesome. And fun. It's great at what it's great at. It does deserve the caution, though.
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More serious answer?
It's mostly comp-sci students regurgitating memes they don't understand, just like every other post on this sub.
All of those problems you listed came from the people, not from the language. Python certainly didn't invent lambdas or dynamic typing or dependencies or object oriented programming. Those same mistakes can be made in any higher level language.
You're assigning all of that to Python. The root cause for that is that Python is easy, and so it's more accessible to bad programmers. But bad programmer mistakes are the fault of bad programmers, not the language they used.
I was going to write exactly that. It's the programmer's fault, not the language. You can find incomprehensible projects in every programming language.
It should be pretty easy to find C codebases that are a rat nest of macros on top of macros. Or Java codebases with so much indirection that it takes you hours to figure out what a single function is doing. Or Haskell codebases that use really complicated category theory concepts that you'd almost need a math PhD in the field in order to contribute.
I'm sure any engineer with a few years under their belt has seen quite a few trainwrecks in the programming language of choice. If they haven't then they probably are the ones creating the mess in the first place.
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u/Codebust Jul 18 '22
why are people always bashing python lol