Mostly objective things to appreciate about Python

14 December 2023

Modified: 27 March 2024

315 words

I really don’t like Python¹, but I have to use it for work, and so I have set myself the goal of learning to appreciate it. This is a list of mostly objective claims about Python that I appreciate. Submissions are welcome, but I’ll only add them if I agree that they’re basically objectively true.

• Python starts up in less than 0.1s, so it can be used for short scripts.
• I guess it is more readable than APL or Cobol.
• You can FFI into better other languages relatively easily.
• It has a more complete standard library than OCaml or C.
• Package management is easier than it used to be, I think.
• It has lots of libraries.
• Some apps (e.g., Blender) use Python for scripting, so knowing Python will help there.
• It has official Qt bindings, so should be one of the easier language-choices for making little GUIs.
• Type annotations + Pyright is better than nothing.
• This is not really an objective thing, but I appreciate the fact that the culture has agreed to import whole namespaces (e.g. import pandas as pd, import numpy as np), so you can always tell where a function or class is coming from (e.g. pd.DataFrame, etc). This also probably helps avoid using “private” APIs: if the top of my file says from whatever import _hello, a thousand lines further down, it won’t look out of place to call _hello() (“maybe it’s just a private helper function defined in this file!”). But if you do import whatever, you’ll have to write whatever._hello(), which will stick out like a marginally sore thumb.
• zip is a built-in function.

I’ll add more points as I think of them.