Well they still have runtimes, but yes they can be pretty minimal.

You’re still shipping a load of libraries that come for free with JS though, e.g. with Rust WASM string formatting and unicode support always ends up being annoyingly huge, and that’s built in to JS engines. There’s also collections (Map, Set), etc.

As someone who works with typescript daily, you’re not wrong. It’s an extremely overcomplicated glorified linter that tries and mostly succeeds in catching basic type errors. But it also provides false confidence when you concoct something that shows no errors but doesn’t behave how you expect.

Ooh, neat. There’s also puepy, which was linked further down in this thread. It’s really cool to see more WASM projects pop up.

Wasm feels like yet another bloat layer on top of the existing web mess :((

uv

Everything else feels 4 to 15 years behind.

You need to get over the bloat of virtual environments. It’s the same as node_modules and it’s completely necessary if you want more than a single python project to live on your machine.

I personally use poetry as my dependency manager and build tool. It’s not perfect but it’s a lot better than pipenv or just rawdogging pip like a maniac. uv is the new hotness, but I haven’t tried it so can’t vouch. People seem to like it though.

JavaScript is also an interpreted language with tons of build tools. The reason to have one for python is mainly about packaging and code distribution, so same as JavaScript. If you want to distribute a program you probably don’t want to just point people to a GitHub repo, and if you want to publish a package on pypi it needs to be bundled correctly.

For ecosystem there isn’t much I can do for you, it completely depends on what you’ll be working on. Baseline you want pydantic for parsing objects, assuming some APIs will be involved. You want black for code formatting, flake8 for linting, pytest for testing. If you’re gonna write your own APIs you can’t go wrong with fastapi, which works great with pydantic. For nice console stuff there’s click for building cli apps and rich and textual for console output and live console apps respectively.

People are actively trying to replace flake8 and black with feature compatible stuff written in rust but again I haven’t tried those so can’t vouch.

Coming from react you’re gonna need to pretty quickly switch gears to thinking more object oriented. You’re gonna be annoyed at how you can’t just quickly declare a deeply nested interface, that’s just how it is. The biggest change other than object oriented thinking will probably be decorators. Typescript had them experimentally and only for classes, python has them for classes and functions natively. They’re a bit tricky to wrap your mind around when you want to write your own, but not too bad. A lot of Google hits will be outdated on this front. Google specifically “decorators ParamSpec” to see how to make them properly.

Good luck in your new job, you’ll be grand!

All documentation is optional and ignored at runtime, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. If your library doesn’t have type hints I’m just not gonna use it, I don’t have the time to figure out what you accept or return.

My biggest pet peeve is the complete inability to annotate a set of known exceptions that a function raises in a machine readable way. The discussion about it is quite heated.

Yeah, they’re useful when developing, which is why it’s so frustrating when libraries don’t implement types. I’m developing and I’m trying to use a tool that supposedly fits a use case I have, but the tool didn’t come with instructions so it’s practically useless to me. I could open the tool up and look at its guts to figure it out but are you kidding me no, I’m not going back to the stone age for your tool.

Pydantic offers awesome runtime validation (using Rust).

What is so bad about virtual environments?

They’re a solution to a self-inflicted problem. They’re only “really nice and useful” if you accept that having your projects stomp all over each others’ libraries and environments is normal.

If projects were self-contained from the outset then you wouldn’t need an additional tool to make them so.

If I need to keep my Python environment separate I’d rather spin up a docker container. They make virtual environments pointless

A sane language, you say.

Yes:

Operator '+' cannot be applied to types 'number[]' and 'number[]'.

We’re talking about Typescript here. Also I did say that it has some big warts, but you can mostly avoid them with ESLint (and Typescript of course).

Let’s not pretend Python doesn’t have similar warts:

>>> x = -5
>>> y = -5
>>> x is y
True
>>> x = -6
>>> y = -6
>>> x is y
False
>>> x = -6; y = -6; x is y
True

>>> isinstance(False, int)
True

>>> [f() for f in [lambda: i for i in range(10)]]
[9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9]

There’s a whole very long list here. Don’t get be wrong, Python does a decent job of not being crazy. But so does Typescript+ESLint.

I’ve worked professionally in python for several years and I don’t think it’s ever caused a serious problem. Everything’s in docker so you don’t even use venv.

“It’s so bad I have resorted to using Docker whenever I use Python.”