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@JonYoder@mastodon.technology You got me thinking in more detail why I reflexively avoid #Python now, despite the fact that I wrote two large programs (#OfflineIMAP and #pygopherd) in it, and published a book about it. 1/

@JonYoder@mastodon.technology It is astonishing to me that #Python still has a Global Interpreter Lock in 2022. https://wiki.python.org/moin/GlobalInterpreterLock Multithreading in Python is mostly a fiction. There are kludges like https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html which use fork, pipes, pickling, and message passing to simulate threads. But there are so many dragons down that path -- performance and platform-specific ones (different things can be pickled on Windows vs. Linux) that it is a poor substitute. 3/

@JonYoder@mastodon.technology Sure, people use #Python for things like #AI work. In this case, Python is merely a shell; the real multithreaded code is in a different language (often C). The way to get performant multithreading out of Python is to not use Python at all. 4/

@JonYoder@mastodon.technology When I started using #Python more than 20 years ago now, it was an attractive alternative to Perl: like Perl, you don't have to worry about memory management as with C, but Python code was more maintainable. By now, though, even writing a Unix-style cat command in Python is extraordinarily complicated https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/ . All the "foo-like objects" are an interesting abstraction until they break horribly, and the lack of strong types makes it hard to scale code size. 5/

@JonYoder@mastodon.technology These days, we have credible alternatives to #Python: #Rust, #Go, and #Haskell (among many others). All three of these are performant, avoid all the manual legwork of #C or the boilerplate of #Java, and provide easy ways to do simple things. 6/

@JonYoder@mastodon.technology The one place I still see #Python being used is situations where the #REPL is valuable. (Note, #Haskell also has this). #Jupyter is an example of this too. People use #Python for rapid testing of things and interactive prototyping. For a time, when I had date arithmetic problems, I'd open up the Python CLI and write stuff there. Nowadays it's simpler to just write a Rust program to do it for me, really. 7/

@JonYoder@mastodon.technology So that leaves me thinking: We're thinking about #Python wrong these days. Its greatest utility is as a shell, not a language to write large programs in. As a shell, it is decent, especially for scientific work. Like other shells, most of the serious work is farmed out to code not written in Python, but there is utility in having it as a shell anyhow. And like a shell, once your requirements get to a certain point, you reach for something more serious. end/

@jdarnold @JonYoder@mastodon.technology Right now, I've been enjoying #Rust quite a bit, but both of those are also interesting and I'd love to find time to dive in more. Sadly time is limited for me right now...