"Python is used by Intel, IBM, NASA, Pixar, Netflix, Facebook, JP Morgan Chase, Spotify, and a number of other massive companies. It's one of the four main languages at Google, while Google's YouTube is largely written in Python. Same with Reddit, Pinterest, and Instagram"
"Python is used heavily in academic research, particularly in bioinformatics, biology, and mathematics. It is the standard introductory language for many university computer science programs."
Misquotation alert: I'm not claiming python is perfect for everything. There are times it makes sense to use something else. Not-short-scripts isn't it.
It's utter garbage outside of a controlled environment. Youtube can use it because Youtube will have an official environment and there will be no such thing as a script that was written in one version or with one module installed that then breaks at run time.
The impressive size of the big users actually works against proving how great it is.
Use the official version inside Google or Netflix: ok.
Use in a package where the package manager ensures all dependencies and versions are met exactly: ok
Use by writing and immediately using and discarding today: ok
Write a random script and expect it to work in 6 months or on any other machine or god forbid another platform: forget it.
python is great for the author and miserable for everyone else
I assume the last time you used python was during the transition from 2 to 3?
I haven't had any problems with versions over the last 5 years. conda is a really good way of ensuring you get the same environment if you need to freeze versions.
conda is a non-standard python tooling with canned environments with packages that are years out of date, a constraint solver in its package manager that randomly seems to run forever, and it's a commercial product.
Of all the Python packaging solutions, it's the worst.
The fact that so many people use it, as a matter of course, is further evidence of the fragility and complexity of maintaining Python tooling and codebases in general. The fragility of Python packaging is how we arrived at the current status quo of needing a CD/CI setup for hello-world.py. My statically-linked Fortran executables? I could keep copying around the same binaries until people switched architecture.
that's what I mean, they haven't had any massive break in backwards compatibility for a while. I did get annoyed by it before and attempted to create my own language/platform - if need be, I have a basic setup of imgui/chibi/c-ffi that I could expand into something useful for scripting that isn't likely to break, but honestly it's such a massive amount of work compared to a conda env so I don't mind sticking with python for now. there's also micromamba which is a lot faster for the solver.
I can't hear you over the sound of pycache directories getting created just anywhere a .py file happens to exist. What genius thought that was even remotely sane? :) You can't hear but I'm being more lighthearted now but really I have no use at all for that shit language.
(yes I know it's configurable, but it also only behaves reasonably when & where that config is in place, not by default. It's opt-out vs opt-in)
I don't really like reinventing the wheel in yet another shiny language, so I'll stick with what works for now. and if I do decide to migrate, it won't be to anything other than C/lisp.
I am literally sitting at a console login because upgrading ubuntu from mantic to noble yesterday destroyed my entire system...because of python 3.12.
The apt output had a ton of errors about py scripts with invalid syntax, and those scripts failing apparently broke everything else and half the system basically got uninstalled, and most of what's left doesn't work, half the services other startup actions failed. Even the login message is broken with python syntax errors. Don't even have network to fix it, even wired let alone wifi. It's reinstall time.
This is today 2024, not during some 15 years ago big transition, and the scripts that broke are all fully packaged and package-managed parts of the os, not even random normal end user written.
This is not remotely a problem of the past and it's all better now and "have you used it lately?".
