I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my
new opinion, they are great for anyone making small projects, and good for disciplined, experienced teams making larger projects, but are really double-edged swords in large projects. If your team really knows what they're doing and can take advantage of the flexibility without creating a mess, they can let you move really fast and make elegant DSLs and so on. But if you let a team of juniors do whatever seems like a good idea, with nobody calling the shots who understands tech debt and the large-scale architecture problems, the mess that can be made is staggering. I never thought I'd say this before, but I would have been happier stepping into C++. :-/
Sure, this is a problem of people, not language. But there is something to the argument that absent discipline and experience, these can be dangerous. One can detangle a dog's breakfast in Java Spring a lot more easily.
(ever seen "import gc" in a Python program? yes, that means what you think it means..)
Sure, this is a problem of people, not language. But there is something to the argument that absent discipline and experience, these can be dangerous. One can detangle a dog's breakfast in Java Spring a lot more easily.
(ever seen "import gc" in a Python program? yes, that means what you think it means..)