Curate, connect, and discover
Eh all programming languages are good for certain use cases (aside from Java - Kotlin is better for android and Go is better for anything else).
Python is good at quick and dirty automation that just needs to get done. It’s very friendly to use and won’t pout at you when you ask it do something. Also once you learn to navigate pandas+numpy combined with Jupyter Notebooks it gets wayyyy faster and easier to use for data wrangling.
For example, I recently used Python to scrape hundreds of thousands of tweets via snscrape without having to use twitter’s API. Once I downloaded all the tweets it took me about 30 minutes to then do some basic analysis/labeling/sorting on said tweets.
Yes pip is terrible. Yes Python has only a hint of types (typescript style type hinting arrived in 3.something). Yes pickle creates so many vulnerabilities. Yes performant Python is basically C in a trench coat.
All that said, there’s a reason Python is many people’s first typed programming language and why I continue to use it whenever I have some data I have to fetch, transform, and analyze or whenever I’m just starting to explore a new field of computer science.
Writing Python is basically like writing pseudo code so I love it for anything that I just need to code up and run once or twice for either a proof of concept before moving to a more “serious” language or just discard the program is for my one-time personal use only.
No one should ever have to maintain more than 1k lines of Python but I will still occasionally write that much Python simply because it lets me explore high level techniques without worrying about being perfectly precise.
Python is not for production but instead for messing around. Python is that goofy ahh language that everyone likes because it doesn’t mind when you affectionately mess with it. Python is the adorable sidekick that makes programming fun again and for that I adore it
Java is a trash language that should burn in the parts of hell where hitler is
Rust on the other hand is a bratty lil language that should burn in the parts of hell where queers party