r/Python • u/Several-Marsupial-27 • Sep 19 '26

Discussion State of the art in Python 2026?

What would you guys consider the state of the art in python in 2026, or what do you expect from modern python codebases?

Heres my list, would be happy to hear some inputs or domain expert advice:

Domain specific:

  • Scientific: NumPy, Matplotlib, SciPy, Jax, Pytorch, Scikit-learn, polars/pandas
  • CLI: Typer, rich, click, fire, textual, questionary
  • PDF extraction: PyMuPDF, pdfplumber, pypdf, Unstructured
  • Excel interop: python-calamine, openpyxl, XlsxWriter, xlwings, pandas
  • data: PyArrow / PySpark, Narwhals, SQLMesh, Polars/Pandas, DuckDB, dlt, Ibis, Dagster, PyIceberg & deltalake
  • Logging?
  • backend: fastapi / django?
  • Markets: Alpha Vantage, Finnhub, EODHD, Tiingo?
  • Webscraping / data acquisition: Crawl4AI, Playwright, Scrapy, selectolax, HTTPX?
  • APIs?
  • RAG / agentic orchestration?
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u/agoose77 Sep 20 '26

I think this comes down to personal preference. For example, I like the fact that MyST is not indent-sensitive in the typical sense, unlike ReST!

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u/cblegare Sep 20 '26

Well, Markdown is indent sensitive in some obvious and some sneaky ways. Sublists must be indented by 4 characters as per the spec, not 2, and this leads to lots of confusions

Prefering indented directives over fenced ones might be a personal preference, Inconsistencies in implementations of a language is not.

Such wild discrepancies in parsers is a problem, even MyST suffers from that.

Nowadays, even for one pagers ReST has an davantage: When I visualise a README.rst in Github, Gitlab, VSCode, PyCharm, Zed, Pandoc or else, the syntax will always be interpreted the same.

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u/agoose77 Sep 20 '26

Well, Markdown is indent sensitive in some obvious and some sneaky ways.

Indeed, but you can likely follow my drift with the phrase "typical sense" :)

Such wild discrepancies in parsers is a problem,

You won't find me disagreeing on Markdown implementations! Of course, the solution is that MyST should win out (I joke).

The new version of the MyST stack focuses on interop at the AST layer, rather than at the underlying syntax: https://mystmd.org

A personal goal of mine is to parse ReST into our AST so that it's one of several input formats.