Take duck typing. It's so easy when you have a small project that can fully understood by a developer. Get into a big project with 10000 classes and you need explicit classes and interfaces just to understand what is going on.

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Python is by far one of the worst languages I've ever seen in relation to maintainability, second only to Javascript (due to missing types, which are fixed by Typescript).

Seriously, it's rare for a Python project with more than 1,000 lines to not turn into an absolute mess thanks to the layers upon layers of meta programming, weird edge cases and so on. There are whole bad patterns I've never seen beyond Python codebases.

Things are improving slowly thanks to type hints and so on, but they are still far from where they need to be. Python is used in even more dynamic ways than JS, so the type system needs to be more expressive than TS. You can't even define a function that appends two tuples with proper type hints!

[–] 8hob@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There's one key qualifier in this sentence: I know. One's skill set matters, I guess...

[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 22 hours ago

Let me guess: The author knows Python, C, C++, Java and maybe PHP.

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 points 22 hours ago

My work uses python and it hasn't been bad for new code that has tests and types. Old code we inherited from contractors and "yolo startup" types is less good, but we've generally be improving that as we touch it.

[–] aluminium@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Also fastest to write? I'd say JS or Ruby are just as fast or barley slower.

What most people mean is that Python has great Libraries which do the thing you want without much fuss. But thats more on the libraries than on the language.

[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 2 points 17 hours ago

i’m proficient in all 3, and i can say with great certainty that generally python is far faster to write

certainly when you’re talking about JS rather than TS, and achiving a usable outcome rather than bashing together bug-ridden trash

[–] SatyrSack@feddit.org 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I do not know Ruby, but Python has a lot of syntactic sugar that, if one becomes used to and proficient with it, makes writing much faster than other languages I know (including JavaScript).

[–] GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 5 points 23 hours ago

Ruby has enough syntactic sugar to give you type 2 diabetes honestly.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not too bad if you strictly enforce Pyright, Pylint and Black.

But I have yet to work with Python code other than my own that does that. So in practice you are right.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

There are dozens of us. Dozens!

[–] lime@feddit.nu 3 points 1 day ago

i had the misfortune once of having to try to understand a >400kLoC python codebase in a critical position and let me tell you that maintainability is a Problem. the system was older than most of the best practices of today and had a structure i can only describe as "a duolith of sqlalchemy soup".

[–] superfes@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yes.

[–] SatyrSack@feddit.org 11 points 1 day ago

It seems "vanilla" Python is slow, but a JIT implementation like PyPy can speed things up significantly. The major downside seems to be that PyPy does not support Python code that relies on some CPython libraries.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

But it's fast enough for us.

[–] andrew_s@piefed.social 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh man, it's only from reading this that I've realised that 'pypy' isn't the same as 'pypi'

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

Python is a great language for folks who occasionally have to do a little bit of programming, but if you have to go into any depth with it you hit shit like that.