Someone was posting a week or two ago having done something kinda like that. Something to do with magic circles or similar, looked rad.

I would love that! I do think there are probably interesting underlying personality factors / preferences for a lot of this stuff as well.

I do think that many of Python’s characteristics map to my own personality and I bet there’s something to that. Things like syntax of course, but not strictly syntax, also things like “The Zen of Python”, and the way its a “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none”. I also really kind of need the freedom and accompanying responsibility to break any “rules” on a whim (Python will happily let you overwrite its own internals while running, for instance), but I almost never do anything that uses it…

I could probably keep going lol. Feels like a “people looking like their pets” scenario, lmao

Everyone’s welcome to their opinion of course, but I find Python more readable than anything else and I resent the visual clutter required to make intentions plain in other languages. Feels like having a conversation where people say the words “comma”, “period”, etc.

I also spend more time with Python than anything else and I suspect these two facts about me relate, lol

Sounds much like PowerBI, which I can’t say I’ve used much directly. But every time we use it, because the client likes the idea and it can theoretically do “all the business intelligence” natively…we eventually find it can only do 80% of what they actually want, which completely removes its single advantage and forces us to go custom anyway. We’ve stopped offering it, to be clear.

Couldn’t agree more. Field service is one hell of a drug. Money’s good, variety is fun, the chaos and travel are fun too, and you learn a lot quickly. The latter often because some or all of the mfg. plant you’re visiting needs you to fix your stuff so they can run, and no one is coming to BFE to help you, lol.

But that all wears off, in time, and it starts to take a huge toll like you described. Never met a long term field service engineer with a healthy home life, or with their health in general. I got out because both of mine were crumbling, for real.

Ah, alcoholic then

Cheers friend!

One tremendous strength of Python no one has mentioned is its vast ecosystem of high quality packages. It’s not just the language features that speed up development, that ecosystem makes a huge difference.

Another (far more subjective) advantage is readability - when written according to Python’s (actually quite opinionated!) style guidelines and general software engineering best practices, Python is also extremely readable, which really facilitates teamwork. My software shop has transitioned to using Python for most things these days for that reason, away from JS, after seeing my work and code reviews, FWIW.

I’m not some wizardly dev, to be clear, but I’m this shop’s first senior dev specializing in Python. I write deliberately clean and readable Python and folks are really enjoying it - enough to voluntarily switch.

Performance is always listed as a Python drawback, and it’s not untrue, it’s just so overblown as a problem. It basically never causes me issues. Crucially, saving dev time is almost always the better choice compared to saving compute cycles. And I’d take that farther and say anyone junior enough to be wondering about Python and performance…is almost certainly working on tasks that Python is well suited to - better suited, than most other languages.

(Hopefully this was not too controversial, but I accept the risk of a flame war, as is tradition lol)

Edit: clarity

Sorry about the narrow urethra, Hank.