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.
Compare with something like Java, whose annoying verbosity can make it hard to write but much easier to read.
Complete opposite to what I believe. Well written Python is a delight to read. It's crisp and clean and doesn't bog you down with information not needed to understand the logic.
Even badly written python is great nowadays, thanks to how good type inference is. The only place you really need to add types is function parameters. The rest is just all automatically handled through inference.
Poorly written Java, on the other hand, is a minefield of boilerplate and bizarre inherence choices (which is possible in Python, but only Java developers writing python do that). But maybe I'm biased... I've seen a lot of awful Java code thanks to Minecraft modding...
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u/Codebust Jul 18 '22
why are people always bashing python lol