What's the purpose of a new language? You can't just say build a language for the 21st century. That's pretty arbitrary. Each computer language is designed to solve a particular set of problems. No language is the best.
The down with syntax stuff is a particularly meaningless argument. Python probably has the most intuitive syntax of any "modern" language. I know many personal projects in python but very few professional ones. The lack of syntax makes python a great language for prototyping but a nightmare for scaling.
To choose which language you should use, I suggest figuring out the following:
- What problem are you solving? Web app, scalable service, low level processing?
- How correct does it have to be? Are bugs and edge cases okay to be tolerated? If not, I'd recommend a more functional language
- How many people are working on it? If many people are working on it, I'd recommend something with a strong type system.
- How "fast" does it have to be?
These aren't all the considerations but I really dislike the idea of modern vs antiquated. Languages will lots of usage are rarely outright bad (except javascript, I love typescript btw)
* How happy / stress free you want to be in your work?
* How fast you want to deliver?
In result programming language's syntax is just one component and should be considered in the context of various practices and tools in use. E.g. unit tested Python code is better than not unit tested C#.
There are certainly many many professional python projects because the world is a giant place but in general, I see it as a less professional language (unless you're talking about data science).
As a full stack dev, I'd rarely if ever recommend python for any of the problems I face professionally. For data science problems, Jupyter + Pandas + Scipy makes a pretty awesome combination.
As for unit tests, I think that misses the point of my argument completely. This is the situation I would evaluate python: you're starting from scratch, what types of problems would you use python to solve? The answer is there aren't that many. I think the most common reason people choose python is that that's the language they feel comfortable with.
I meant more along the lines of what the author is describing. There's not a ton of syntax in lisp (of which I only have a cursory understanding - so take with salt) but python has the most "readable" syntax. Words like: "with", "is", "not" are all keywords replacing more traditional operators.
The down with syntax stuff is a particularly meaningless argument. Python probably has the most intuitive syntax of any "modern" language. I know many personal projects in python but very few professional ones. The lack of syntax makes python a great language for prototyping but a nightmare for scaling.
To choose which language you should use, I suggest figuring out the following:
- What problem are you solving? Web app, scalable service, low level processing?
- How correct does it have to be? Are bugs and edge cases okay to be tolerated? If not, I'd recommend a more functional language
- How many people are working on it? If many people are working on it, I'd recommend something with a strong type system.
- How "fast" does it have to be?
These aren't all the considerations but I really dislike the idea of modern vs antiquated. Languages will lots of usage are rarely outright bad (except javascript, I love typescript btw)