@diazona Sure, hit me with it, maybe there'll be something that entices me. Doing something because it's what everyone else is doing was pretty well drilled out of me in school (though I suspect I'd have ended up with that opinion anyway). So, while I would like to be able to interact with projects using python, that alone isn't enough of a motivation. It needs to be something specific about the language, not the people using it.
@diazona And I'm definitely not telling anyone else not to use it, even though I'd definitely appreciate it if they didn't so I could participate. Or, at least, that they don't dismiss my ideas because I'm not fluent in python and can't implement it myself. Like, there's a 3D printing project (won't name names) that doesn't officially support my kind of printer (with a circular print bed), and it was kind of working until they rewrote it and hard coded it to only support rectangular beds.
(2/3)
@diazona I looked over the code and figured out roughly what needed to be added and where. The reply was something along the lines of "thank you for the thorough feature request, but we can't test it because none of us have round beds." I even offered to be the test subject, but got nothing. So either I need to learn python, then get familiar with their code base, both things they already know, and do it all myself, or I'm completely out of luck.
(3/4)
@diazona Round beds are implemented as square, and then just ignore everything that's not in the circle. That's all they needed to do.
(4/4) (whoops, that got away from me a bit 😂)
Sep 22, 2026, 7:48 AM@StarkRG 😂 haha relatable. Sorry about that experience. I know sometimes open-source maintainers can be kind of brusque, but I also understand the perspective of being asked to fix something on a platform you don't have access to, and sometimes it really just isn't feasible, as unfortunate as that is.
Sep 22, 2026, 7:48 AM@StarkRG Anyway, back to the topic at hand: I think one of the main things I like about Python is its flexibility and "scalability", in the sense that the complexity of writing a program scales well with the complexity of the program. For simple scripts you don't even need functions, you can just write loops and if statements and print()s in a file and run it and it does the thing. But then when you need functions, you have them; when you need objects, you have them; when you need threads, you have them; when you need project metadata and test runners and third-party packages and all that stuff, they're there. That means beginners don't have to deal with Java-like boilerplate or complex project setup, but advanced users still have access to the advanced features they want - not necessarily perfect, but certainly good enough to write a lot of useful programs in.
Another thing that I like is the package registry (PyPI) and the package distribution system in general. Once one learns a few basic things about how to use virtual environments, any random functionality you want is pretty much a `pip install` away. And that includes bindings to other languages, which often makes up for the fact that Python itself is not very fast. There are a ton of packages that implement something computationally intensive in C or Rust or whatever and wrap it in a layer of Python to make it easy to use interactively.
I should also mention to be fair that a lot of useful stuff is included in Python's standard library, and sometimes as relatively high-level abstractions which are reasonably easy to use. So there's a lot of stuff you can do in Python without ever having to use an external package.
And another thing I've come to appreciate more recently is that the Python has learned pretty well (IMO) how to maintain and evolve the language. Everything is defined by standards, and there are clear processes for modifying the standards. So things about the language generally don't change, at least not in any drastic way, and when they do change, you can be fairly confident that the change has been "audited" and often tested by a lot of people. It gives a pretty good sense of stability - certainly not unique among languages, but relatively speaking, there are not that many programming language communities with this level of maturity.
(All just my personal opinion, of course)