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.
Julia, R, Matlab, Mathematica and Fortran.