Re:Faster Python with Guido van Rossum
by biztos on Thursday October 07, 2021 @01:32PM
(#28789566)
A third possibility is you’re a team in a larger company, and then it could matter a lot.
I wrote a few things in what I’m pretty sure was correct, idiomatic, best-practices Python 3 and almost immediately I could see some familiar problems from my Perl days looming on the horizon, especially around testing, packaging and maintainability.
I enjoyed writing Python code and for the right kind of startup or hobby project I might use it in the future, but there is so much black-boxed weirdness in the ecosystem, so much inconsistency in paradigms, and so much temptation to “cheat” that I’d definitely think twice before committing a team to it. And I didn’t even get as far as the performance issues.
On the other hand, of course, you can opportunistically “move fast and break things” within a larger org too. But I worry that if you get too committed to Python, you will be unreasonably dependent on your lead engineers sticking around.
I wrote a few things in what I’m pretty sure was correct, idiomatic, best-practices Python 3 and almost immediately I could see some familiar problems from my Perl days looming on the horizon, especially around testing, packaging and maintainability.
I enjoyed writing Python code and for the right kind of startup or hobby project I might use it in the future, but there is so much black-boxed weirdness in the ecosystem, so much inconsistency in paradigms, and so much temptation to “cheat” that I’d definitely think twice before committing a team to it. And I didn’t even get as far as the performance issues.
On the other hand, of course, you can opportunistically “move fast and break things” within a larger org too. But I worry that if you get too committed to Python, you will be unreasonably dependent on your lead engineers sticking around.