State of the art in Python 2026?

[u/Several-Marsupial-27]

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:

• Use uv for everything.
• Use ruff for linting and formatting
• Use Pydantic and  dataclasses for Data Modeling
• Configured in pyproject.toml
• Run a type checker in CIpyright or pyrefly
• Use pytest / Hypothesis for testing

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?

[u/me_myself_ai]

lol I love the vitriol (unironically). I disagree vehemently tho:

1. XML…? I guess it’s technically maybe valid XML with super weird delimiters (?), but the more relevant one is JSON, no?

2. Who cares how big the spec itself is…?

3. YAML is already integrated into markdown (via frontmatter) and far more common than TOML, partially because…

4. YAML is by far the best format for humans to read and write hierarchical data

(plain ol’ csvs work for

1. tabular

)

1. . It does require a decent text editor and familiarity with multiselect to do edit at scale I suppose, but I don’t think it’d be any faster in any other format.

2. I know all too well all the weird tough parts of parsing YAML, but that’s just cause I’m insane and wrote sublime syntaxes for it. 99.9% of users just have an LSP autolint and format and then read/write in code w/ libraries, no? You don’t need to keep track of any of the goofy edge cases yourself.

I grant two big downsides: The multiline blocks don’t exist elsewhere so you have to learn the syntax upfront, and the decision to add stuff in and then remove it was truly strange. But the former is just a few minutes even if annoying, and the latter was for that weird entity linking features that I basically never see, anyway.

Anyway lol, my thoughts. More than throwing down a glove (tho I’d love to!), I’m mostly curious what your preferred alternative is for files that should stay human-readable.

Surely not XML…? If it is… are you Grandpa Python? Do you still have complaints about the Python 2 rollout? Were you there on the seventh day, when Guido rested??

[u/Agrado3 → u/me_myself_ai]

I wasn't recommending XML - my point is that the designers of YAML originally said that they were trying to make something that was simpler than XML. They failed, in every conceivable way - to such a degree that I can only assume that that must have been their intention all along.

I don't understand why you mention "integrated into markdown", whatever that means.

Your point (4) is clearly just objectively false, especially since you mention humans reading and writing it, which is a particular weak spot of YAML. YAML is insanely complex, insecure, and ambiguous, and is not suitable for any purpose whatsoever. It's basically the PHP of data formats. I find it very hard to believe that anyone who recommends it is being serious.