alt Hacker NewsThis feels like the time I was a Mercurial user before I moved to Git.
Everyone was using git for reasons to me that seemed bandwagon-y, when Mercurial just had such a better UX and mental model to me.
Now, everyone is writing agent `exec`s in Python, when I think TypeScript/JS is far better suited for the job (it was always fast + secure, not to mention more reliable and information dense b/c of typing).
But I think I'm gonna lose this one too.
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For historical reasons (FFI), Python has access to excellent vector / tensor mathematics (numpy / scipy / pandas / polars) and ML / AI libraries, from OpenCV to PyTorch. Hence the prevalence of Python in science and research. "Everybody knows Python".
I do like Typescript (not JS) better, because of its highly advanced type system, compared to Python's.
TS/JS is not inherently fast, it just has a good JIT compiler; Python still ships without one. Regarding security, each interpreter is about as permissive as the other, and both can be sealed off from environment pretty securely.
Python has the advantage that everybody sort of knows it is bad and slow, which is an important trait for a glue language. This increases the incentive to do the right thing: call a library written in C or Fortran or something.
A big benefit of letting agents run code is they can process data without bloating their context.
LLMs are really good at writing python for data processing. I would suspect its due to Python having a really good ecosystem around this niche
And the type safety/security issues can hopefully be mitigated by ty and pyodide (already used by cf’s python workers)
Python has uv, ruff, ty
Tangentially i wonder if the recent changes in the GIL will percolate to mercurial as any improvements.
Yep still using good old hg for personal repos - interop for outside project defaults to git since almost all the hg host withered.
Can we please make as little js as possible?
Why would one drag this god forsaken abomination on server-side is beyond me.
Even effing C# nowdays can be run in script-like manner from a single file.
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Even the latest Codex UI app is Electron. The one that is supposed to write itself with AI wonders but couldn’t manage native swiftui, winui, and qt or whatever is on linux this days.
Having been doing Python for over a decade and JavaScript. I would pick Python any day of the week over JavaScript. JavaScript is beautiful, and also the most horrific programming language all at once. It still feels incomplete, there's too many oddities I've run into over the years, like checking for null, empty, undefined values is inconsistent all around because different libraries behave differently.