Python Is Eating the World
Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I&#x27;m going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious...<p>I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future barely-trained developers who will ostensibly have to come and work with my code. Every moment working with python (and that infernal pep-8 linter insisting 80 characters is a sensible standard in 2019) increases my burnout by 100x.<p>I try to remind myself that we&#x27;re trying to make the industry less exclusive and more welcoming to new developers and &quot;old&quot; isn&#x27;t necessarily &quot;good&quot; (in fact, probably the opposite), but damn I just don&#x27;t understand it.<p>It used to be that I could focus on other languages (Erlang, Nemerle, F#, Haskell, Ocaml, even C++) and sort of balm myself. But now, I can&#x27;t even overcome the sinking feeling as I read the Julia statistics book that I&#x27;m going to be dragged back to Python kicking and screaming in the morning, so why even bother?<p>And frustratingly: it&#x27;s one of the few languages with decent linear algebra libraries. And that means it&#x27;s one of the few languages with good ML and statistics support. So it&#x27;s very hard not to use it because when you want to cobble together something like a Bayesian model things like PyMC or Edward actually give you performance that&#x27;s obnoxiously difficult to reproduce.<p>This is what the industry wants and evidently a lot of people are okay with it, but to me it&#x27;s misery and I can&#x27;t work out why people seem to like it so much.