Python is a Bad Programming Language
I’ll say it again: Python is a bad programming language, and the only reason it’s so popular today is because Google pushed it so hard in the first decade of the 2000s.
The creator of Python, Guido van Rossum, actually worked at Google from 2005 to 2012. Go and Dart weren’t around back then (or at least they weren’t well known) and with C# gaining in popularity (stealing would-be Java developers) Google probably felt they needed a language of their own. They probably would have wanted to embrace Java, as they were already using it with Android, but they must have been paranoid about getting into bed with it because they were already running into legal issues with Oracle. So for whatever reason, they adopted Python. I imagine in an alternate universe they could have chosen, say, Lua, and maybe in that universe Lua would have become the dominant language today. Of course Lua is kinda weird, so it’s probably better they didn’t choose that one after all.
But let’s talk about why Python sucks. It can be difficult to talk about why something sucks, especially when it’s popular, but this article will be an attempt. I’m going to be covering the language itself, not its performance or its implementation. I’ll be mostly comparing it to Java and C#, as these are two well-known, mature languages that have had plenty of real-world use in the software industry for over…
