Is Cutting-Edge Python Intriguing at PyCon 2021?

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2021-05-17 12:59:14

I attended PyCon 2021 over the weekend. I’ve been using Python my entire career but recently it became my daily driver and primary language. I thought that attending this conference would help me learn how to leverage more advanced language features on a daily basis. I was hoping for talks like I’ve seen at CppCon. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

The second group might be normal for language conferences and they were interesting, they just did not have enough code to provide practical learning. I attended a handful of talks about performance, which usually boiled down to implementing critical bits of code in Cython. The most enjoyable talk was by Luciano Ramalho (author of Fluent Python) about PEP 544, which aims to provide ways to do static duck typing as a more “Pythonic” approach to type hints introduced in PEP 484. While I’m in favor of using type hints, especially for a large codebase, I couldn’t help walking away thinking: “Should these pain points be solved by using another language?”.

It is an oversimplification and most people can’t choose what language they use at work every day. But when I looked at some of these deep dives into performance and typing, I think there is an inflection point somewhere to make the switch. Maybe the key conclusion is that Python is very mature (old?) and the problems it faces with regard to new language features are no longer that interesting.