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#python on freenode is my go-to alternative if I can't find an answer on SO or if I'm more interested in a brainstorming session and can't really ask for one in SO

but then again not every problem I have involves Python, in which case I do feel I'm out of luck...



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I use #python as an absolute last resort.

We don't have specific plans for our next SDK to build, but Python definitely comes up often - thank you for the input!

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?

I’m not gloating about Python, I feel stuck.


Pesonally, I like Python because it is simple, oo, lot simpler to debug and goes well with javascript/json(utf-8 by default).

I am big fan of Tornado - tornadoweb.org

Almost free hosting by google appengine is not bad either!


Python is a good fit for CLI tools, but it doesnt differ that much from node when it comes to complex backends.

Type annotations in py3 might change that, but lets be honest - py3 is still far from broad adoption.


Looks nice but wouldn't you just use something like Python nowadays?

There has actually been quite a lot of work in this area. A colleague of mine wrote up a comparison of several solutions last year:

https://anvil.works/blog/python-in-the-browser-talk

We build our all-Python full stack dev environment (https://anvil.works) on Skulpt - but there's a lot of room in that solution space! If you haven't checked out Mozilla's Pyodide project, for example, it's truly impressive - they compiled all of CPython and popular data science libraries to wasm for a full notebook experience in your browser:

https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide


True, Python is good for this, it also comes by default on mac!

I used to write scripts in python. I switched to node. Benefits for me.

1. Python by default requires tons of globally installed libraries. Node by default all libraries are installed local the the project. Nothing to learn. It just does it. That means I don't have to worry about trashing my system and I don't have to tell users a bunch of prerequisites to get it to work.

2. Node is ~8meg and installs instantly. Python is 18-30meg and the install has a long build process IIRC

I will still sometimes reach for python. I needed to parse an 8 gig geodata XML file. The libraries I tried in node were orders of magnitude slower than python for that particular task. I did try node first though since it's where I'm at.


Eh, no tool is great for everything.

I think python applies broadly, but it isn't great for building an OS. :)


Yeah to be honest we don't use Python for anything other than the build system, but it is available on all our systems so it is easy to use, and I couldn't find anything better. I would have liked to be able to use Typescript, but there's no really good simple way to say "Node: compile and execute this typescript file, please don't save the output on disk anywhere, or try to read tsconfig.json or package.json or whatever".

Ok- the million dollar question- what to use instead of python..?

Wow, lots of python. I use it quite a bit too but mainly for scripting. What are you guys using it for?

No Python?...seriously? I'm still learning so I don't have any clout to throw around concerning a good Python code-base. Any suggestions?

Python would be a terrible choice for this.

* It's been dragged into static typing kicking and screaming.

* You import the whole Python infrastructure/packaging catastrophe.

* It's not sandboxed.

If you wanted something Python-like you would you Starlark.


No need for any alternatives. Python as an API is good enough.

Definitely a good alternative until we have a Python SDK :)

There are wrappers for python, again never used either.

Yeah, absolutely no reason you couldn't do this (quickly) with Node. The only reason I see to use Python over Node here is for a smaller dep tree (sane Node development still requires a lot of dependencies) and some more mature CLI libraries - lots of CLI apps are written in Python.
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