I love Python, but basically 96% of Python code and developers absolutely suck at everything, I'm fixing a shit python codebase right now. It's like a language which people love to use to write shit code.
Python has become my goto for anything more complicated than a 3 line bash script, but not so complex it need multiple files to logically separate the code. Argparse isn't perfect, but it lets you get 90% of the way to a nice functional argument parsing system, with auto-generated help output that mostly doesn't suck. It's also built in so I can rely on it being anywhere python is already installed. And python is ubiquitous enough in default installs now I can pretty much rely on it being present as much as I can rely on bash being present.
As a result, every command line bit of glue code I've written for the last decade or so has been in python. At a certain point, it does start to get unwieldy and you can indeed write some awful code in it, but then again, I've seen some pretty awful bash scripts too.
My favorite trick is the fact that you can tell python to
It's evolution. I like Python, it gets love and support. And it's all about the data structures - really. With python all I have to do is figure out the data - the rich set of OO, functional or imperative approaches and APIs does the rest.
It's the same as in Visual Basic: those who request programming languages for dummies, they have a tendency not to be the brightest software developers in the toolbox.
Visual Basic as a language is just C# for people who want to type more to do the same thing.
Visual Basic as a tool for building Windows programs with GUIs was pretty hard to beat though.
Maybe there are tools that churn out fully-polished react just as easily nowadays, but I wrote a janky little data visualization app in 2 hours at my internship and they ended up using it for almost 15 years.
shit code is proportional to number of people developing. on average, about 98.56% of developers don’t know what they are doing and with millions of them writing their shit in python you end up with…
Ruby has the syntactic power to write stuff very succintly, lot of good apis (and some crappy too), had since its inception a good repl which perl always ignored..
There was a time, just before the rails boom, when ruby had a lot of traction in admins and that-era-devops circles
