[chpmrc]

I could address each of these "issues" but I'd rather focus on the following:

> The language itself is extremely poor

> I think this is not something most Python users are aware of

These two statements are contradictory. If it was indeed so "poor", people would notice :) If they instead increasingly adopt it (out of appreciation, not because they are lobbied into doing it) it becomes really difficult to logically demonstrate that it's a poor choice. Software development is a very efficient market. Everyone is (or can be) aware of (almost) everything. So if most people (including experienced devs) gravitate towards a certain technology, the only acceptable explanation is that the technology, as a whole, is good.

Deconstructing and pointing out the flaws of the individual components is a common flawed thought process IMHO. Python is great despite all the issues you point out. To me this is equivalent to comparing individual components when shopping for a product, missing the fact that it's the ensemble of all those (flawed) components that make the product (or the language, in this case) work. The easy syntax, the packages, the community, those are all things that make "weird scoping rules" pretty much irrelevant.

[lambda_garden]

> These two statements are contradictory. If it was indeed so "poor", people would notice :)

Would they? The history of programming is full of great ideas that took a very long time to reach mainstream adoption. We also did some things that in hindsight were bad ideas, but for a time were very popular.

This is because the programming language "market" is not rational. It moves at the speed of education, not the speed of innovation. People learn a language and they make useful things with it. Why would they stray into niche languages and PL research?

[chpmrc]

I don't claim that Python is the perfect language and it will never be replaced, in popularity, by something that is better.

What I'm saying is that considering Python a bad language, just because there are some languages that improve on some of its shortcomings, is just wrong.

As of today, Python is the most popular, hence (as a corollary) the best choice for most people. One day that might change, sure. These aren't mutually exclusive.

I don't agree with the claim about the market not being "rational". Someone who adopts Python even when given requirements that are clearly beyond the language's capabilities isn't going to last long in such market (and neither will their choices).

On the other hand there are plenty of people (myself included) who prefer using Python whenever possible, even though they have been "educated" in the use of other languages (I'd say I'm fairly comfortable with Typescript or even C building non trivial systems). I guess I'm not innovative enough :)

[chlorion]

You could claim the same thing about JavaScript. It's very possibly more popular than Python, but it's definitely not better designed than Python or most of the other languages in current use.

[chpmrc]

Yes and that would be a correct claim. Unless one assumes that a language is objectively "good" or "bad", in which case, rationally speaking, we would only be using "good" languages, which is clearly not the case. Ironically the same happens with natural language. In theory we should all be using Esperanto by now, in practice English as the de facto international language is totally fine.

The main difference with JS is that we don't know whether it would be so commonly used if it wasn't for browsers. Still, it seems that the majority of efforts are towards augmenting JS' capabilities rather than finding ways to use alternative languages on the web (yes, I'm aware of WASM and maybe in the long run this statement will be proven false).