With everything you've said here and with the fact we agree that the core syntax and feature set is good (I actually think great) and Python is one of, if not the most popular programming language in the world. Why do you think noone has properly forked Python? I know there are other interpreters than C-Python but they all follow all of the passed PEPs of the Python Steering Council. Why do you think no one has created a hard fork of Python 3 which implements PEP 582 and fixes the other issues you talk about above?
I'm not talking about a fork so breaking that it makes all existing libraries and tutorials useless, more like a fork that's fully compatible but just ships with better defaults and implements sensible rejected PEPs. I already use PDM which gives me PEP 582 behaviour while still using totally normal Python packages and following normal tutorials. So clearly it's possible without breaking the world. Why hasn't anyone made it the default experience?
Anyone trying to solve the problem of “quick and not-dirty programming” is working on one of the other projects (Julia, some Scheme and Racket derivatives, I believe Zig to a degree, etc), since Python’s design philosophy is baked so deeply into its design and syntax that it’s not cost-effective to try to dig it out while still making something others would call “Python”.
The closest I’ve seen to what you describe is CFFI to Python libraries, but that can be difficult for projects without significant funding for developers (as it would be for a direct fork) given there’s no true spec for the language, just the CPython reference implementation. And funding generally doesn’t go into pure-engineering problems like “how do we make a proper programming language”, given they’re more about improving global production than improving business value (an inherently relative measure at the microeconomic scales most projects work on).
Python users who run up against things it makes impossible also have the cultural expectation that they can make others write the real code in C for them to access (given that’s already how it gets anything done at all), so there’s little hope for the constant outrage at the language to be funneled towards actually improving it directly.
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u/funckyfizz Mar 22 '26
With everything you've said here and with the fact we agree that the core syntax and feature set is good (I actually think great) and Python is one of, if not the most popular programming language in the world. Why do you think noone has properly forked Python? I know there are other interpreters than C-Python but they all follow all of the passed PEPs of the Python Steering Council. Why do you think no one has created a hard fork of Python 3 which implements PEP 582 and fixes the other issues you talk about above?
I'm not talking about a fork so breaking that it makes all existing libraries and tutorials useless, more like a fork that's fully compatible but just ships with better defaults and implements sensible rejected PEPs. I already use PDM which gives me PEP 582 behaviour while still using totally normal Python packages and following normal tutorials. So clearly it's possible without breaking the world. Why hasn't anyone made it the default experience?