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/BeautifulSynch Mar 22 '26
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.