In a previous article, I enumerated a bunch of popular programming languages and tried to quickly determine which ones seemed like they'd still be useful in another decade.

Now, I'm drilling more deeply into Python.

Setting up a Python development environment

Ah, my old nemesis: Python. I've never had a good experience setting up a Python environment. Additionally, the Python 2 to 3 migration (which included unnecessary things like changing the semantics of the division operator) had so many breaking changes that people are still using Python 2 (even though it is no longer supported).

Yet Python is consistently one of the most popular programming languages. What am I missing?

While setting up Python, I noticed that typing "python" into my Windows command prompt launches the Microsoft Store app (compliments of %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\WindowsApps\python.exe). I'll give the installer a try since it's a surprisingly reasonable ~100 MB download. Apparently, Microsoft decided to insert this Python shim into Windows itself just to make it easier for people to find Python. Interesting.

Going through the tutorial

While going through Python's official tutorial, I'm already seeing things I don't like:

Syntax gripes:

• There are else blocks on loops
• pass is needed to denote empty blocks
• There are abbreviations that are easy to forget, such as elif
• *, **, and / are overused in Python's syntax
• The syntax for both tuples and sets tries to be pretty, but just ends up creating weird edge cases, such as item, (requiring a trailing comma) for a single-item tuple and {} being an empty dictionary and not an empty set
• "f-strings" can't be arbitrarily nested (i.e. you can't use quotation marks inside an f-string that is delimited by quotation marks)

Module woes:

• The module loading system seems needlessly complicated (__init__.py, __all__, import *, etc.)
  • It even prepends the main module's path to the search path, so local modules are loaded in preference to standard library modules of the same name (pro tip: never create a file named random.py)
• The default global scope has too many members
• Virtual environments are definitely not my preferred solution to managing conflicting dependencies

Scoping complaints:

• Variables introduced in a for loop go into the enclosing scope (making it easy to accidentally change variables in the enclosing scope)
• global seems dangerous

Overall first impressions

Here are my impressions after going through the Python tutorial and playing with Python for a few days:

• I don't like the syntax, but I also don't hate it as much as I expected to
• Python definitely shows its age, and it has a lot of compatibility-related warts that are unpleasant
• There are some handy syntactical conveniences (e.g. list comprehensions)
• I am strongly in favor of its "batteries included" approach that yields a robust standard library (it even has SQLite out of the box!)

Ultimately, Python's biggest advantage is its popularity.

Next steps

Now that I've read up on Python and written some basic scripts (mostly to solve Project Euler problems), I'm going to play around with machine learning using Python and NumPy.