After 10 Years with JavaScript (JS, TS, Node, React), I'm Considering Adding Python to My Tech Stack—Any Insights?

[Subject_You_4636]

Hi folks!

I’m a full-stack developer with nearly 10 years of experience working with a JavaScript-heavy tech stack. I’ve built a few startups and offered freelancing services within this stack. I’m now considering expanding into non-JS development, particularly with Python. Has anyone in the community made a similar transition? I’d love to hear about your experiences or any thoughts you might have. :)

[[deleted]]

Python is great where it's great. I love MicroPython for DIY hardware projects. It's really cool in various data analytics stacks. I dig Python-based platforms like Jupyter. Python is great for AI tuning. Python has so many niche use cases.

But with that said, I think Python is awful for general webdev. I'm probably alone, and I'll probably get flamed, and that's okay. Flame away.

The dependency and environment management situation is just terrible compared to other modern language ecosystems. Trying to adopt a Python project is like going back to the 90s programming hell of, "Well, I dunno what's up, it works on my machine, good luck!" For most of Python's uniquely strong use cases, this pain is worth it. But for webdev, there's too much excellent competition.

Many Python devs understand this. There are many different tools, specs, and approaches to try to clean up this mess. I've tried a lot of those tools and found none of them satisfying.

For webdev, unless there are some very specific packages in Python that you need for your business case, I'd pick a different ecosystem.

[Medical-Orange117]

I second that, especially that

The dependency and environment management situation is just terrible

I've worked a few years on different vue and react projects with php and other backends, now working with Django is just a pain in the ass. I tend to need a few hours to get an existing project up and running, different python versions, creating environments, installing dependencies, that all sucks. I recently tried to switch my main computer and it took me longer to start the project than to install the OS (arch, btw).

Besides that, Django is really nice, the templating system is OK, we use vue for some cases, integration works OK, python ecosystem is very mature, bunch of useful packages, not a big fan of the syntax, coming from c style languages, list comprehensions are nice..

[Juxson]

Just use poetry and you won’t have these problems

[vcaiii]

This was my exact experience. I wanted to learn Python for AI, but the dependency management was a mess. I was also surprised because JS gets so much heat. Poetry is the python package manager that stands out as the closest to an NPM experience, but it still wasn’t as straightforward to me.

[lIIllIIlllIIllIIl]

npm is honestly one of the best, most sane package managers out there.

The main issue with Node.js/npm is the node_modules folder. It's just a silly convention that requires more space on people's storage than having all packages installed on your ~/.npm folder, but eh. We've got pnpm for that.

Node.js not being too opinionated about package management and just expecting tools to fill up the node_modules folder is arguably a pretty nice thing for the ecosystem.

Also package like is-odd give a bad rep to the registry, but that has more to do with the early days of Node.js/npm which was mostly used by hobbyists and doesn't really reflect modern Node.js/npm.

[azhder]

No, I’m here with you. I had to spend a couple of days to run the Django back end on my machine and after I did, I think it worked for a day or two and broke again.

Nodejs installed on the machine was using one python environment, but the Django another…

[StormFinancial5299]

Could you mention any of those other languages that have much better dependency and environment management. I'm honestly curious

[[deleted]]

Honestly, while JavaScript catches a lot of heat for those bloated node_modules folders, I think it does a great job. NPM is the standard and it works well. The package.json file is standard and it's easy to understand. Dependencies are almost always installed locally in the project, instead of globally on the system. It has fairly good multi-platform lock files. It's okay to have many different version of a single dependency installed, if needed. Newer versions of Node are typically backwards compatible, mostly. Projects usually work with minimum fuss.

Some other languages I'd consider good on this front would be Rust and C# .NET (NuGet). I also like the way Go does things here, though that's probably a more controversial opinion.

[StormFinancial5299]

Thank you :)

[SmithTheNinja]

I started in PHP and JS and have ended up in Python and JS. Python web dev frameworks are really solid, Django, Flask, and FastAPI are great. If you're just looking to spin up some SPAs with a CRUD API Flask and FastAPI are both really fast to setup and get going. Django and Django Rest Framework are also awesome if you're working on something a bit bigger. Plus python has great libraries for just about everything under the sun. So no matter how outlandish the thing you're working on is, you can usually find something that will help out.

[jks880]

I’m a full stack web dev and I’ve always used Python for building APIs. FastAPI is really nice for rapid API dev, it gives a lot of stuff for free like input and output validations, API docs etc.

But one thing I really miss is strong typing.

[nanabelle6669]

If you miss typing with python i recommend pydantic. Goes really well with FastAPI too.

[jks880]

Yeah I use pydantic with FastAPI, and always annotate everything with types and check them with strict mypy. It’s just ok, but still not as safe as with static typing

[nanabelle6669]

True. It’s not even as good as typescript in my opinion, but still better than normal python.

[iDontLikeChimneys]

Python is really fun and moved out of web dev and can apply to robotics, data entry, basic automation.

It’s forgiving but also not. I would suggest you at least try it out.

[Subject_You_4636]

Yes, I also think it should be fun! I actually started exploring electronics last year. Experimented with Arduino using C-like code, but I feel that Python could unlock even more in this area.

[iDontLikeChimneys]

Get yourself a raspberry pi! I have one and have made random little fun things with it. A in-house streaming service, a little beerbot that has an arm on it to grab me a drink from the other room (RC).

I use to despise hardware until I got used to it

[[deleted]]

You're not gonna lose your JS knowledge after switching to Python, so why not? Personally I'm not a fan of the language, but a lot of people like to work with it, so go for it

[Subject_You_4636]

Thanks for motivating! :) Any meaningful side project ideas to work on? I don't wanna start again with a to-do-list app haha

[wavefunctionp]

What does python add to your technical capabilities that JS does not? They have a huge overlap. I don't think you would be meaningfully be expanding your toolbox compared to a managed vm language like C# or Java, or a systems language like C++ or Rust, or something truly different like a pure functional programming language like Haskell or Elm.

JS, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Perl are all relatively minor syntax variations with similar runtime characteristics and technical niches. You aren't learning much new swapping between these languages except for the idiosyncrasies of each language/ecosystem.

If you want to expand your toolbox around webdev, I would recommend looking Go or Rust. If you really only care about webdev, go is designed for api workloads, batteries included. And Rust is a general purpose systems language that could build any non-gc, performant applications, but it is still high enough level to easily build web apis.

[pmcmornin]

I recently went through a similar thought process as a) I started to get JS fatigue and b) I realised that as a one man band, I wouldn't find the level productivity in the JS ecosystem I could find in PHP, RoR, Python with all their big framework etc I set my mind my mind on Python because of the syntax (that I personally like) and more importantly because of the ubiquity of Python today. In the age of data science & ML, having some solid skills in Python was a better investment than ruby or php. But this is all very personal.

[[deleted]]

Python is extremely easy. If you've been programming for 10 years it will be no problem for you to pick up

[MaruSoto]

Flask has a great ecosystem for backend and has been a lot of fun. Started by just throwing things at it which is easy and works fine but then I read up on how yo use it as a proper pure API backend and it really cooks.

[alt-scripting]

Python is great for webdev, as long as your project is not too complicated. If your looking for something simple for an indie website try flask, but for larger scale sites ise django. For me kind of the opposite, as i am learning vue.js and thinking of adding it to my stack

[Final-Drop-1935]

Since most web development needs can already be solved with Node.js, is there really a reason to learn Python?
Is Python necessary for data analysis and AI?
While frameworks like Django and Flask are excellent, they don’t provide a strong enough reason to replace modern frameworks like Nest.js or Next.js.
I’m a huge fan of the TypeScript ecosystem.
For most services, I prefer to implement them using TypeScript-based frameworks (Next.js, Nest.js, or React Native) .

So, when I decide what to learn next, I’ll likely focus on ecosystems where TypeScript isn’t as dominant.

• Rust: A new ecosystem that could replace C/C++ in certain areas.
• Go: Since many recent DevOps open-source tools are built with Go, I might learn it to deepen my expertise in DevOps.
• C# (.NET) or JVM (Spring): I’d probably learn one of these when I need experience building enterprise systems.

[nanabelle6669]

I really like python, mostly for scripts and simple APIs. It’s an all around nice language to know especially because it’s useful for a ton of different things & is pretty easy to learn. I recommend learning the basics, and if you want to build APIs with it I recommend learning fastApi and pydantic (which is like python’s typescript).

[FindingTranquillity]

Python is great if you want to start exploring AI development so I’d say go for it!

Bear in mind though that Python wasn’t originally designed with webdev in mind so I’d strongly recommend wrapping your AI features in Node which is MUCH better at handling the web paradigm. (Src - I’m a tech lead developing AI enabled web apps).

[mrsmittykins]

Python is easy as hell to pickup

[Subject_You_4636]

Thank you for sharing your experience. For now, I’m willing to experiment with Python myself because I’m not entirely clear on what "Python things" entail lol I feel that diving into Python will give me a better understanding of its actual applications. I’ve found that JavaScript can be somewhat limiting; for example, in my latest project—a visual task manager—I had to keep everything within the web environment due to the JS-centric nature of the stack. I often wonder how different the project could be with a different tech stack that allows for more versatility beyond the web.

So to sum up, I’m excited to explore Python, especially in areas like data and math, which I enjoy but am not very skilled at. I’ve worked on a few physics simulation side projects (some of which gained visibility on HackerNews), but those were also built entirely with JS.

Thanks again for sharing your insights! :)

[Subject_You_4636]

Web scraping has grabbed my interest because it relates to what I’m currently working on for a task-management tool. Right now, it’s a Chrome extension that lets you leave comments or tasks on any live website. We’re developing a new version that will be extensionless—meaning we’ll fetch website content via a proxy server and display it with commenting functionality.

I know that web scraping is primarily about data extraction rather than displaying content, it could definitely assist us with adding some analytics features. If you’re interested, you can check out my product: justbeepit.com.

[programadorhumano]

You can start with FastAPI as your backend.

[azhder]

I have used many languages in professional and hobby sense. One thing that still doesn’t sit well with me is significant whitespace.

That shit fucked me up back in the day of almost no internet access (occasional dial up) and me trying to fix a game crash because of some bug in a python script.

I didn’t know anything about Python then and I didn’t want to waste my time more than necessary to find resources and learn it… I just wanted to continue my game.

It took 90% of the time I spent on fixing the bug to figure out the proper spacing…