CAcarapace·Mar 18, 2022Recommendation phrase
You've got a point in re: Python being good enough for several niches. However, I think the set of people who want to do all those things but don't want to use multiple languages is pretty small, like it's a hobbyists' market, eh?
A scientist typically wouldn't write web backend, a sysadmin doesn't do a lot of statistical stuff, etc.
A small startup might do well to make their MVP in Python, but as the code grows the implicit costs (of using Python) do too.
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In re: Rust, sorry I wasn't clear above. I don't mean that Rust is a glue language, I mean that people write e.g. grep replacements in it and things like that. Python does systems programming by being glue, Rust does it by being, well, Rust. It makes sense to me that Rust libs would get Python wrappers, but it also seems to me that that adds to my argument: Python is good f
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or small glue, but crunchy things (like grep) should be written in e.g. Rust or Go or something.
(I feel I should mention in this connexion my favorite bit of obscure Python trivia: Python was originally meant to be the shell language of the Amoeba distributed OS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_(operating_system) )
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One other thing about Python is that the packaging & distribution "story" is ridiculous now. The people in charge of that call themselves the Python Packaging Authority (which name, given what they're doing, reminds me of Brazil the movie) and they seem to me to be running amok, cargo-culting the crap out of what should be a pretty simple and straightforward problem. I could go on but I feel a rant brewing, so I'll cut it off there.
It's not just the PyPA folks that are having problems packaging and distributing Python. The Conda folks ship Tkinter in a broken state for five years now: https://github.com/ContinuumIO/anaconda-issues/issues/6833 That's the default GUI system that's in the Python Standard Library.
Compare and contrast with Rust's Cargo, or Nim's Nimble, or Erlang's Rebar, etc.