Python started as a scripting language and I wish people would’ve let it be like that. Using Python for large systems is a nightmare. Especially if you want to juggle random contributions from indviduals that you have to vet carefully because god knows what some small change might break - Python for sure won’t tell you.

I love the idea of piefed. Don’t listen to the python haters below. Most of them don’t know what they’re talking about. Almost all machine learning is done on python for a reason. I’ve designed and run a python service serving thousands per day, from scratch, without issues. Python is perfectly capable of making a service like lemmy and a great choice due to how easy it is to use for development.

I wish I had more free time and I would contribute to it

The biggest thing that PieFed has done is get up and running on public data with new accounts open to the public. This trial by fire will make it fail fast or become much improved. It seems that the main developer is quite experienced and has thought about architecture and improvements that have already been implemented. I think it’s promising for all of these reasons.

My biggest potential concern is that moderation tools have not been implimented yet (unless the were very recently).

As far as Python being difficult in larger systems, this can be mitigated by experience and good practice. But I tend to agree that Python is typically not the ideal choice for a large project.

The good thing about Python is that it’s widely used. Easier to find people who can contribute in Python than Rust, which Lemmy is using.

Downside is that Python isn’t ideal for large scale systems. Other languages like Java is better at protecting the programmer against common pitfalls that come when building larger applications. Python is more ideal for smaller scripts.

I wouldn’t get massively excited.

Python is a scripting language, its shines when you want to write a stand alone file which takes an input and performs a task. Scripting languages are great to learn as a first language and so python is wonderful for non developers.

The issue you hit is the build management solutions for Python are kind of broken and these help support and encourage good development practice so a lot of Python projects end up a collection of scripts rather than a mature project. You can have good projects but…

In raw benchmarks Java has 90% of the performance of C/C++, but in reality Java is more performant because developers get bogged down in memory management on C/C++ and they get more time to optomise in Java as a result. I’m not sure where Rust will come out to be honest.

Python benchmarks at 50% the performance of Java, in reality I’ve found code ends up slightly worse because Python is procedural, library support and streaming is poorly supported.

Take library support, Spring really rose to prominese because of ‘hibernate’ which was a way to abstract talking to different databases through objects, you could switch from PostgreSQL to Oracle through config. Spring data has dumbed this down so I define a plain old Java object and Spring will generate everything I need.

Python expects you to hand craft SQL statements and every database extends SQL slightly differently, so i need to write SQL for every operation and manage/own it. So the win in being able to quickly read/write to a database (since you don’t have to learn anything about Spring) is quickly ruined because of the all the boilerplate and error handling you now have to write.