OSDev.org

Everyone seems to hate Python here, which is ok. But people have not been very specific about what they particularly dislike most. The language design, the interpreter, the deployment philosophy, the quality of the packages, the inconsistency in the latter, the idioms and methodologies. In order to judge Python, we should acknowledge that while it is a general-purpose language, a conventional use programming language it is not. It is more of the utility variety, like Perl, Tcl, etc. It is really good for experimentation, automation, prototyping, but not for making products. It also has very good meta-programming facilities for imperative language. The thing that doesn't sit well with me is its non-existent parallelism. Despite not being performance targeted, having one concurrent thread of execution per process is too limiting.

Schol-R-LEA wrote:given that my primary assertion was that - regardless of salary and other aspects - there is no such thing as professional software development, and there won't be any in our lifetimes

I confirm this. I also believe that no matter how much we are blowing our horn about new programming paradigms and methodologies, new platforms, infrastructures, standards, etc, it all boils down to lack of maturity in our field. That would have been much more obvious if the industry was not so vital and lucrative. We are a little more than tinkerers really.

On the other hand, abstract as it may seem, life in general may be a little more than Turing computable process. To have a methodology or automated system for producing correct computer programs may turn out equivalent to knowing how to live without a fault. Which, again abstractly speaking, is what we were trying to achieve when we started making software. To succeed would be redundantly circular. We would be solving a problem, by solving the same problem first. But more concretely, our industry definitely does produce too many formulaic solutions whose importance is exaggerated, while fundamental issues remain unaddressed.

Python is one of my favorite languages, actually. However, it has flaws like anything else - honestly, fewer than most IMAO - and it doesn't help to ignore them. The package management system, while far from the worst I have seen, has a lot of sharp edges to it.