As Python’s lifetime grinds to a halt

Oh, pshaw.

First, very few languages have actually died. Fortran and even Cobol are still alive. It’s possible that there are more Fortran programmers today than there were when I learned Fortran (a language I haven’t touched in almost 40 years).

Second, as a mature language, people who just want to write programs and don’t care about the latest thing are going to keep starting new projects in it for at least another decade.

Third, the whole “Python is slow” thing just doesn’t hack it, because programmer time is much more valuable than CPU time.

Pure Python is an order of magnitude slower than C++ but very few things we write are CPU bound. numpy and scipy let you perform matrix operations at C++ speeds. And interfacing Python and C++ is really easy these days if you want to get the last ounce of performance.

Finally, and extremely important, Python is “batteries included” in a way that Julia isn’t.

Some years ago I was working on a Python project where I got a feature request where I needed to read and write .gz files as well as the uncompressed ones we had been doing. I’d allocated half a day for this, but it turned out that I could literally drop gzip.open in place of open. It took me an hour, and most of that was changing the unit test.

Julia looks interesting! In a decade, we’ll see. But to declare Python dead is silly.