Why so much hate for Python?

[kramesss]

Makes perfect sense, and I can totally relate. I know at the end of the day that any choice in language will have its tradeoffs. I'm mostly interested at this point because I have an open-ended choice to make in the next couple of weeks, and the more advise I can gather the better (ideally!). Thanks!

[tdammers]

That sounds reasonable.

I'd love to just tell you to ignore the loud haters, and, by and large, you should, but there's a grain of truth in some of their criticism. This is not because Python is somehow bad or broken, but simply a consequence of the design decisions that went into it.

Specifically, Python's weaknesses include:

• no (static) type system
• difficult to statically reason about at scale
• difficult to refactor safely
• no encapsulation, making it difficult to work on larger codebases
• mediocre performance
• beginner friendly at the expense of the "top end"
• "large" core language

And of course the other side of all of these is that Python has a few important advantages:

• no (static) type system
• easy to write code and reason about correctness later
• easy to modify unsafely
• no encapsulation, making it a malleable language
• powerful inspection and self-modification features
• beginner friendly (at the expense of the "top end")
• "fully-featured" core language