I'm one of Python's biggest critics (to me it's a Monkey's Paw of software development), but I think this is exactly the appropriate situation to use it. It's great for one-off fancy calculations, system scripts, ideally with no dependencies and/or a short lifetime
> to me it's a Monkey's Paw of software development
This piqued my curiosity. I've worked with Python on and off for the last ~20 years, and while I'm not a fanboy or apologist, and use other tools when appropriate, there's also a reason it remains in my toolbox and sees regular use while many other tools have come/gone/been replaced by something better.
Can you share an example scenario where it's a Monkey's Paw? My suspicion is that this is more of an org issue than a tech issue?
Dependency management/tooling. Python (philosophically) treats the whole system as a dependency by default, in contrast with other modern languages that operate at the project/workspace level. This means it's very hard to isolate separate projects under the same system, or to reproducibly get a project running on a different system (even the same OS, because the system-wide state of one machine vs the next matters so much).
People work around these issues with various kludges like virtual environments, Docker (just ship the whole system!), and half a dozen different package managers, each with their own manifest format. But this is a problem that simply doesn't exist in Go, JavaScript, Rust, and others.
For code that never needs anything except the standard library, or for a script that never needs to be maintained or run on a different machine, Python is fine. Maybe even nice. But I've watched my coworkers waste so many hundreds of developer-hours just trying to wrangle their Python services into running locally, managing virtual environments, keeping them from trampling on each other's global dependencies, following setup docs that don't work consistently, and fixing deployments that fail every other week because the house is built on sand.
Virtualenvs, and requirements are a thing in Python for ages.
I’ve used tons of languages and while not the best, Python dependency management and project isolation is decent. IMO certainly better than JavaScript.
It's decent if you've been in the loop enough to use it. It's not built-in. It's a good practice, for sure, but it not being built-in at the language level makes it insanely easy for a newcomer to just... Not use virtualenvs at all.
In contrast to Javascript/Node.js/NPM/Yarn/whatever-you-want-to-call-server-js, which maintains a local folder with dependencies for your project, instead of installing everything globally by default.
Heck, a virtual env is literally a bundled python version with the path variables overriden so that the global folder is actually a project folder, basically tricking Python into doing things The Correct Way.
