alt Hacker NewsIMO the main reasons people use Python are:
1. The very first steps are quite simple. Hello world is literally just `print("hello world")`. In other languages it can be a lot more complex.
2. It got a reputation as a beginner-friendly language as a result.
3. It has a "REPL" which means you can type code into a prompt and it will execute it interactively. This is very helpful for research (think AI) where you're trying stuff out and want to plot graphs and so on.
IMO it is undeservedly popular, or at least was. Wind back 10 years to when it was rapidly gaining mindshare:
1. While "hello world" is simple, if you went further to more complex programs you would hit two roadblocks: a) the lack of static type checking means large programs are difficult to maintain, and b) it's really really slow.
2. While the language is reasonable, the tooling (how you install packages, manage the code and so on) was eye-bleedingly abysmal.
3. While the REPL did technically exist, it was really bare bones. It couldn't even handle things like pasting code into it if the code contained blank lines (which it usually does).
However since it has become arguably the most popular language in the world, a lot of people have been forced to use it and so it is actually getting quite decent now. It has decent static types (even if lots of people still don't use them), the REPL is actually decent now (this changed very recently), and there's a new third party tool called `uv` to manage your code that is actually good.
The biggest issue with it now is that it's still horrifically slow (around 50-200x slower than "fast" languages like C++, Rust etc). It is pretty unlikely that that will ever change. People always try to excuse this by saying Python is a "glue" language and you just use it to connect components written in faster languages, but a) that's pure "you're holding it wrong", and b) that only works in some cases where there are nicely separated "slow bits" that can be moved to another language. That's the case for AI for example, where it's all numerical, but for lots of things it isn't. Mercurial was a competitor to Git that was written in Python and lost partly because it was way too slow. They've started writing parts in Rust but it took them 10 years to even start doing that and by then it was far too late.
> what would you suggest?
It really depends on what you want to make. I would pick something to make first and then pick the language based on that. Something like:
* AI: Python for sure. Make sure you use uv and Pyright.
* Web-based games: Typescript
* Web sites: Typescript, or maybe Go.
* Desktop GUI: Tbh I'd still use C++ with QtWidgets. Getting a bit old-school now tbf.
Also Rust is the best language of them all, but I dunno if I'd pick it as a beginner unless you really know you want to get into programming.
Replies
ptpython has existed for a decade, maybe two, and python is high level, more readable than most languages. Exec speed hasn’t mattered in my near thirty years of using it for business and prototyping tasks which it promoted early.
Yes it strains at the big to huge project end, not recommended to take it there. Still there are better tools to help now.
I think "Python is slow" is reductive and frankly just as useful as saying "Python begins with a 'P'". The story is more complicated than simply speed of execution.
Choosing a language is a game of trade-offs: potentially slower execution in return for faster development time, for example. If your team is already familiar with Ruby, will asking them to write a project in Rust necessarily result in a better product? Maybe, but it will almost certainly take much longer.
Anyway, how many Python programs are actually "too slow"? Most of the time, Python is fast enough, even if heavy computation is offloaded to other languages.
As for Rust being the best language of them all, that's, like, your opinion, man.