I love Python, but basically 96% of Python code and developers absolutely suck at everything, I'm fixing a shit python codebase right now. It's like a language which people love to use to write shit code.

Because it's so easy the average quality of the user is lower. This isn't surprising to me.

At least people still love it :D

It's the same as in Visual Basic: those who request programming languages for dummies, they have a tendency not to be the brightest software developers in the toolbox.

Visual Basic as a language is just C# for people who want to type more to do the same thing.

Visual Basic as a tool for building Windows programs with GUIs was pretty hard to beat though.

Maybe there are tools that churn out fully-polished react just as easily nowadays, but I wrote a janky little data visualization app in 2 hours at my internship and they ended up using it for almost 15 years.

Python has become my goto for anything more complicated than a 3 line bash script, but not so complex it need multiple files to logically separate the code. Argparse isn't perfect, but it lets you get 90% of the way to a nice functional argument parsing system, with auto-generated help output that mostly doesn't suck. It's also built in so I can rely on it being anywhere python is already installed. And python is ubiquitous enough in default installs now I can pretty much rely on it being present as much as I can rely on bash being present.

As a result, every command line bit of glue code I've written for the last decade or so has been in python. At a certain point, it does start to get unwieldy and you can indeed write some awful code in it, but then again, I've seen some pretty awful bash scripts too.

My favorite trick is the fact that you can tell python to

It's evolution. I like Python, it gets love and support. And it's all about the data structures - really. With python all I have to do is figure out the data - the rich set of OO, functional or imperative approaches and APIs does the rest.

Python is great for prototyping...

Then you write it again in a better language...

Or you could just write it the first time in the real language.

Python isn't appreciably faster than something like Typescript to someone with actual experience making programs professionally.

shit code is proportional to number of people developing. on average, about 98.56% of developers don’t know what they are doing and with millions of them writing their shit in python you end up with…

I'd say rather - ruby.

Ruby has the syntactic power to write stuff very succintly, lot of good apis (and some crappy too), had since its inception a good repl which perl always ignored..

There was a time, just before the rails boom, when ruby had a lot of traction in admins and that-era-devops circles

Python isn't a serious language for programmers.

It's for non-programmers.

For a non-serious language there are a lot of successful non-programs written with it.