15 years of Python here, started in 2.4. Day to day Python is not more complicated to use. It's actually easier due to many bugs fixes, quality of life features and better error messages.
However, Python does provide more tools to do more complicated things (async, type hints, etc), but that's not what most people use. They actually don't even know about it, and don't have to care. So it's not the questions you see on SO.
Python has gotten much, MUCH more popular, and we are currently facing a wave of new beginners. Particularly from schools (it's now the default teaching language in most countries) and from loads of workers that can benefit from manipulating data with programming and are attracted to Python for this.
It is precisely because Python is still easy that it's that popular: it doesn't benefit from massive existing code bases like Java or accidental monopoly like JS. We just have a lot of people creating a lot of libs for pretty much everything, because everybody can do it.
I also think the aesthetic of the language plays a big role. Python has been designed to allow you to dev with it with just MS notepad if you have to. It means you don't need to learn about a gigantic and complicated ecosystem to be productive with it (although it does exist): it's a huge help for all those people that are just getting started or not a programmer at heart. It's also harder to create very ugly code because you don't know what you are doing, and if you do, the result will not be as bad as with other languages because Guido made sure of it.
It's also why you don't get multi-line lambdas. Everything is a compromise.
I mostly agree with you, but still think that Python could be way simpler and equally powerful. I'd love to see a language similar to Python, but with named structs instead of classes, for instance.
That is one thing about Python that has always been interesting. For new programmers, it's such an attractive language because it's very simple to get up to speed and pump out usable code.
But to really start leveraging Python for more serious projects it's extremely useful to use Classes. And that's actually an appreciable bump in difficulty for inexperienced devs. I've seen go to great lengths to avoid it.
Maybe named structs would be a simpler way for them to level up complexity, especially if they're coming from a C background.
>It's also why you don't get multi-line lambdas. Everything is a compromise.
Arguably too much of a compromise. This is just Guido doing a "because I say so" and imposing his bias against functional programming. Give me a properly-designed language like Ruby any day over Python's bag of compromises.
On the other hand, as someone who reads other peoples code just as my as I write my own, maybe by the time your lambda is many lines it should have its own name. And maybe the name should be really informative about what the function does.
And yet Ruby never took off outside of RoR and is dying. Lisp and Haskell are still niche languages.
So somehow, languages promoting big chunks of anonymous code never win never win the public heart.
In fact, when you are force by an accidental monopoly to use ine, you get js. What do people do in JS ? Multline lambda are mapped to property names or replaced with await. Registries are used in every framework. We spent 2 decades fixing JS to use as little callback hell as possible.
Coming from Perl, Python library documentation makes me want to tear my eyes out. No I don’t want a cutesy fucking module homepage, I want reference documentation with some examples. Authoring PyDoc was the worst experience too. No I don’t want to install and configure a static site generator in order to have rich text documentation.
It's strange to see this is your experience, because I had the exact opposite: Python documentations are usually very comprehensive, nicely formatted. Important projects have very good documentations and setting up a new documentation is very easy with Sphinx. Maybe you should try it again, it might have changed a lot since you looked it.
Sphinx starts from the point of view that you're going to write your documentation as if you were writing a book, then on top of that it has some optional features for pulling in information from source files.
Most of the others start from the view that you're autogenerating documentation from source-code comments, and on top of that there are some optional features for pulling in some extra content from documentation-specific files.
I think the Sphinx way tends to produce better documentation in the long run, but it takes more effort to get to something just-about-adequate.
I understand your point, and Go is probably better in this regard, but it's pretty easy to get started with Sphinx with autogenerating documentation from code. You don't have to manually write anything.
Some python documentation conventions are weird, to be sure. But I’d rather have an eternity of Sphinx build toolchains than the hell that is making POD/Perldoc work for medium-to-large projects (or small ones, for that matter).
I started with python 1.7, two decades ago, and I don't find it any harder to use than back then. The language is pretty much the same as in the late 90s, complexity wise.
But back then, it was an insider's language, my teachers didn't know it existed. Then, year after year, I saw it become more and more popular.
But it is still so easy to use. Nowadays, I use it to teach programming to teenagers, and in less than a week I can teach them pretty cool and complex stuff (UCB algorithm, markov chains, simulated annealing, traveling salesman problem) because the language is so easy it does not get in their way.
Probably both. Python ecosystem is expanding super fast. Look what is happening in data-science. Newborn Python libraries getting outdated too soon just like in JS ecosystem.
Expanding? Hope they expand & knock down most of the garbage documentation I've seen in python. I don't need any more library ref static sites like they do with java but with a python feel to them. Give me a functional example of how to use your code, not that you have lots of special methods that do things. Show me how those things are done.
Userguides and references are both important parts of software documentation. A guide that covers problems and their solutions is a good way to start learning how to use a library but when you want to do something that isn't covered by the Userguide you absolutely need a reference that just lists what functions are available on which time in a bare bones manner.
More popular, especially for homework assignments (i.e. among people who don't know how to search and don't understand Python well enough to read the docs).
I'd say the former: Python is becoming more and more common as an introductory language, and is used as "glue" in many fields that people try to get into (AI, "data science", ...). There's also been a few areas where complexity has been added (asyncio in my mind being the main new source of confusion), but I don't think those are common enough to have a huge impact.
