Re:Astral to Join OpenAI
by alsetmusic on Friday March 20, 2026 @08:00AM
(#47453383)
I had a breakthrough moment when someone at a workplace (software dev) said something about a thing that wasn't working on their device. Their language made it clear to me that they didn't know how to troubleshoot to figure out how to fix it. But they could write software that ran on millions of devices. Ok, that made me take a step back.
In the early 2000s I was in a rough patch in my career and wound up working at a small town web design shop that had done a lot of really amazing work, like a line of business system for car dealers, an e-commerce site for vineyards, a custom CRM for an academic department, etc. Nobody there knew about version control (not so weird in 2005) or how to write joins in SQL.
And that's a big part of what's so frustrating about Python generally: it seems to be a language used by lots of people who've never used anything else and have an attitude like "why would I ever try anything else"?
Python has a culture where nominal values of user-friendliness, pragmatism, and simplicity often turn into plain old philistinism.