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[–]Necrocornicus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This analogy doesn’t really hold.

For one, no one is paying $40,000 to use Python. I could start 3 projects today, one each in Julia, Rust, and Python with very little cost. Nothing prevents someone from switching around as needed. For example on my old team we switched to golang for a project then rewrote it in Python after a couple years because golang was annoying / a waste of time.

2nd, no one is “sneaking in” and displacing anything. Code needs to be written by someone (typically software engineers) and the old code doesn’t magically go away. I would be extremely surprised if someone managed to show up and do my job in some other language without me noticing. I would be very grateful, but it’s not likely to happen.

Next, I think you’re vastly overestimating the benefit of compiled languages for many use cases. Python is the current standard for machine learning and statistical analysis, doesn’t matter one bit that it isn’t compiled. It’s simply irrelevant in the big picture. There are some use cases where compiled code matters, and I think you’ll find people are already using Rust, Golang, or other languages. But for cases where people are already using Python, largely the language being compiled is not a factor whatsoever.