On one hand it's nice that there's a standard way to specify types in Python now, but TBH, if I'm going through the trouble of specifying types then I'm going to use a language that has them built in and fully exploits them. In particular, not using them for performance tuning seems like a big miss.
Agree. At that point it's just better to go back to Java or <insert your favorite statically typed language here>. Java has a broad solution to type safety and a standard doc format for code. Sure there are awkward corner cases around things like type erasure but I find Java for the most part just works.
Disagree, performance is a side-effect of type safety... it's main use is to prevent bugs and help devs reading code. Also we use Python for the library ecosystem, easy to read syntax etc. which Java will probably never match. For performance, use Go or Rust and get everything Java has plus an active modern community.
Performance and type safety are absolutely linked. The only major reason JS is still 5-10x slower than Java is looseness of types preventing optimizations.
The Java community is still vibrant and much larger than Go and Rust put together. Modern stuff like RxJava, Lombok, MapStruct, streams, Guava, Gson, Retrofit, DropWizard, Vert.x, etc... Make Java a breeze these days. The learning curve is just steep.
And the Java ecosystem is easily larger than Python. Python may be nearly as popular now, but Java has been in the top three for nearly two decades.
A lot of shops use "vanilla Java" out of ignorance without modern libraries and it's crufty as hell. It's similar to shops still using JQuery hacking vs those that have awakened and use React and Typescript, practically a different language
"modern." I hear that word a lot. What are the concrete benefits of those languages beyond subjective properties like readability? COBOL is readable if you work with it regularly.
Just as an example the Golang scheme for managing package dependencies still leaves much to be desired compared to the maven ecosystem commonly used in Java projects.
> Just as an example the Golang scheme for managing package dependencies still leaves much to be desired compared to the maven ecosystem commonly used in Java projects.
