I want to switch away from Python, at least for personal projects. I want to broaden my range, experiment with weird paradigms (Raku) or get code that’s a little faster (eg Rust).
The problem is that I use Python as a “glue language” and heavily rely on excellent third party libraries. I don’t want to learn how to write a minimum spanning theorem algorithm; I’m used to have it next to several other convenient graph utilities in networkx. There’s so much stuff for Python — where else will you find something like giotto-tda?
The JVM ecosystem is similarly rich (and basically the only one comparable; there are many js packages but they are more opinionated towards web development), with plenty of languages to choose from (and with Graal’s python implementation you can even write python code that interoperates with other JVM code)
As for concrete languages, I like Java, because it has just enough abstraction to make it useful and is not overly complex. Scala is a real gem in that it was one of the first OOP+FP hybrid, a marriage that seems really fruitful since then basically every OOP lang introduced more and more FP concepts and vice versa. There is also Clojure if you are into LISPs. If overly functional programming is not your thing, Kotlin is a modern language with some additional features to Java though I am not particularly fond of it. And there are even more niche languages running on top of it.
But the real gem is the JVM itself, and it is really actively developed and many new, exciting features are in the works.
Raku also has the Inline::Python module, that allows you to use just about any Python (3) module "natively" in your Raku program. The interface is not as polished yet as it is with the Inline::Perl5 module, but there is a GSoC proposal to improve on that! https://github.com/perl-foundation-outreach/gsoc-2021-ideas/...
The problem is that I use Python as a “glue language” and heavily rely on excellent third party libraries. I don’t want to learn how to write a minimum spanning theorem algorithm; I’m used to have it next to several other convenient graph utilities in networkx. There’s so much stuff for Python — where else will you find something like giotto-tda?
I’m not gloating about Python, I feel stuck.
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