"Interesting how Python is now considered a huge pile of features"
I've been tracking Python since 1.5.2 was common and 2.0 was just coming out. For me, it's not been a problem because the new features were added incrementally.
But I've seen new programmers try to come at it in 2019 and 2020, swallowing what I got spread out in ~15 major releases over ~20 years all in one big chunk, and learning even the core language now is definitely "a pile of features", to say nothing of the various library ecosystems. I don't even mean this necessarily as a criticism per se, just a description. It's not an easy-to-learn language anymore, and I don't recommend that people model it as such. It's a power tool for developers, not an easy learning language.
And, yes, the "you can pick and choose the features" is a non-starter in a team environment. At best, the team can pick and choose, and that takes a rather strong hand and alignment to achieve. It is a very common case that you'll just end up with what your teammates use.
> And, yes, the "you can pick and choose the features" is a non-starter in a team environment. At best, the team can pick and choose, and that takes a rather strong hand and alignment to achieve. It is a very common case that you'll just end up with what your teammates use.
I wonder if this wouldn't be much of a problem by, say, 2025. Already I'm used to having multiple linters run on save that fix up spacing and indentation like Prettier does. I'd expect people to make tools that'll complain if you're about to check in code that's too complicated for your team (uses lots of parentheses in a line without temporary variables, uses overly-complicated reduce() calls, etc.).
That's a good point. One of the original appeals of Python is that it started as a pedagogical language, and it shows. Even Python2 today still has most of that feel.
Python3 on the other hand, just isn't. You're pretty much required to constantly deal with Unicode and its related issues, and this is a burden for beginners. In Python2, you can kick that can down the road almost indefinitely.
That hasn't been my experience. In Python 2 your program would appear to work fine initially, but the first time your data happens to contain a non-ASCII character you would get a mysterious UnicodeDecodeError somewhere far away from where the actual problem is.
In Python 3 it just works again, like it did in Python 1.5, before the whole str/unicode implicit-conversion mess was introduced in Python 2.
I've been tracking Python since 1.5.2 was common and 2.0 was just coming out. For me, it's not been a problem because the new features were added incrementally.
But I've seen new programmers try to come at it in 2019 and 2020, swallowing what I got spread out in ~15 major releases over ~20 years all in one big chunk, and learning even the core language now is definitely "a pile of features", to say nothing of the various library ecosystems. I don't even mean this necessarily as a criticism per se, just a description. It's not an easy-to-learn language anymore, and I don't recommend that people model it as such. It's a power tool for developers, not an easy learning language.
And, yes, the "you can pick and choose the features" is a non-starter in a team environment. At best, the team can pick and choose, and that takes a rather strong hand and alignment to achieve. It is a very common case that you'll just end up with what your teammates use.