Python: The Documentary [video]

With no real recent experience (I fell deep down the hole into C/kernel etc), I wouldn't have any authority to judge how it's adapted to time. But the most common complaint I've observed at companies of all size and sophistication is "the deployment story is a disaster". But it also seems like uv allows people to do all the "I want this specific version of such and such and I don't want $OS to know about any of this" well?

Re math/ai it's an interesting comment because a language is one part the syntax/stuff you receive, and one part the community that tells you to do things a certain way. I'd guess that Python has become such a big tent it is a little hard to enforce norms that other languages seem to have. This somewhat reminds me of Bjarne Stroustrup discussing scaling/evolving a language.

Packaging has been a nightmare. PyPI has had its challenges. Dependency management is vastly improved thanks to uv - recently, and with a graveyard of tools in its wake.

The modern Python script feels more like loosely combining a temperamental set of today’s latest library apis, and then dealing with the fallout. Sometimes parallels the Node experience.

I think an actual Python project - using only something remotely modern like 3.2+ standard library and maybe requests - is probably just as clean, resilient, and reliable as it ever was.

A lot of these things are and/or have been improving tremendously. But think to your point the language (or really the ecosystem) is scaling and evolving a ton and there’s growing pains.