Python is the most popular programming language and beloved by many. However I can’t understand why (this is still the case in 2024).
Here are my main gripes with it:
- It is slow, performance intensive tasks have to be offloaded to other languages, which makes it complicated to analyse. Moreover I wonder how many kwH could have been saved if programms were written in more performant languages. (and there are better alternatives out there)
- The missing type system makes it easy to make errors, and the missing compiler makes it hard to catch them
- It has no linear algebra built in, so you always have to convert things to numpy arrays, which is quite annoying
- Managing virtual environments and pip packages feels overly complicated
I guess much comes down to personal, but I just can’t understand the love for python.
No I mean, Python is definitely the most used language in scientific computing, but yeah, I would use something else if I could.
Why would it be better or important in any way to have that be a “language feature” instead of a library?
If it can be a library, it’s obviously not something that needs to be a part of the language. Most uses have absolutely no need for linear algebra. Why drag on useless baggage and bloat?
Yeah that point was not entirely accurate. What I meant was, that a np.array and a list don’t work together. Coming from julia and matlab it just does not make sense to me, why I can’t use a function written for a list for a np.array even if they basically represent the exaxt same thing.
Julia for example hast linalg as a module but functions work on lists with no problem.