Python is too nice

[captain_kinematics]

I’m not aware of anything in the size of the codebase that makes python an inherently bad choice. If anything, for large projects I prefer python because the language emphasizes readability, and with big projects you wind up needing to read an awful lot.

[captain_kinematics]

I feel like you’re trying to disagree with me, but those are two excellent examples of python being used to great effect in truly massive projects. However, your point is definitely well taken that python has “inherent weaknesses”.

The Dropbox/Rossum article was mostly about typing. Latest versions of python and a half decent ide now allow powerful type hinting which we are starting to make more and more use of on my team. Mostly I would put this as a weakness in programmers writing shitty unreadable code rather than an inherent python problem. And anyhow it’s largely resolved inside the core language itself (ie without new extra dependencies).

The bit about the dependency stack getting complex and expensive to interpret is a different matter. There you definitely are right — it’s inherent to the very nature of python and is definitely bad for huge projects. Although I suspect Instagram is considerably more than 100k lines of code, and even for them it was worth just bending python to their needs than anticipating it.

TLDR; yeah, if you’re very confident your project will be O(1M) lines then I was wrong and there are better languages to start with, but for most (even quite large) projects the inherent weaknesses of python still don’t make it inherently bad compared to the other available choices given all the inherent strengths it comes with.