alt Hacker NewsI felt the opposite, because Python isn’t a great language. It won because of Google, fast prototyping, and its ML interop (e.g. pandas, numpy), but as a language it’s always been subpar.
Indentation is a horrible decision (there’s a reason no other language went this way), which led to simple concepts like blocks/lambdas having pretty wild constraints (only one line??)
Type decoration has been a welcome addition, but too slowly iterated on and the native implementations (mypy) are horribly slow at any meaningful size.
Concurrency was never good and its GIL+FFI story has boxed it into a long-term pit of sadness.
I’ve used it for years, but I’m happy to see it go. It didn’t win because it was the best language.
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I’m always baffled when language complaints come down to syntax
> lambdas having pretty wild constraints (only one line??)
I will never understand why people are upset about this.
You HAVE multi-line lambdas. They're called functions.
Yeah, I know you want a function that's only used once to be able to be defined in-line, but tbh I've always found that syntax to be pretty ugly, especially once you're passing two functions to a single call, or have additional parameters AFTER the function (I'm looking at you, setTimeout/setInterval).
Lambdas are intentionally kneecapped in python because Guido van Robson doesn't want to make a functional language. (As in "functional programming", not that it doesn't work.)
> there’s a reason no other language went this way)
Except of course for those that did, Haskell, Fortran for example.