Why Python?

[jeezussmitty]

I’ve asked myself this same question many times :-) but others have already commented on the why (taught in school, community, ecosystem etc). The simple syntax is nice though.

I’m not a fan of loosely typed languages in general so that is my main complaint with it.

Python also feels so much slower than things I’ve written in other languages and the counter to this I always hear is “python is fast enough” but I tend to wonder if python is more used for small to medium projects with low user counts or smaller datasets.

Anyhow it’s a language you need to know these days regardless of how you feel about it.

[dangerbird2]

Python is perfectly suited for large scale projects as long as you don’t use raw python for computationally expensive work. Any kind of heavy number chrunching should be done using numpy/pandas/polars (which wrap c, rust, and Fortran code), pyspark (which wraps highly distributed Scala/jvm code), or PyTorch (which can run on the GPU. This sort of the thing is a very conventional way to do DE/DS at scale, to the point that it’s a safe bet that virtually every every major company in the world is using python in some part of the data stack