Python creator studies various coding languages [Pro's and Con's!]

A list of the advantages and disadvantages of other programming languages is provided by Python creator Guido van Rossum.

Discover which language works best for you!

A number of other programming languages are making their way onto the scene these days, and Python creator Guido van Rossum has offered his thoughts.

“At least, in theory, I love languages,” says Van Rossum. In spite of reading language tutorials, I am very bad at actually downloading and trying to code something using a language implementation because it is almost always easier to say "Oh, I know how to do that in Python".

Here’s what Van Rossum thinks of other coding languages:

1. Python creator on Julia

Van Rossum also mentions Julia, a programming language that has features of imperative, functional, and object-oriented programming, as well as interfaces for C, Fortran, C++, Python, R, Java, and many other languages.

According to Van Rossum, Julia is an interesting application of Python, but once you realize the indexing is one-based and range is inclusive instead of exclusive, you realize you shouldn't mix Julia and Python in the same application. 

In his opinion, Julia is more of a niche language and if you're in that niche it's superior since the compiler optimizes your code for you in a way that Python probably can't.

Julia has much fewer capabilities in other areas so I don't expect anyone to ever write a web server in Julia and find much benefit from it.

2. How Python creator thinks about TypeScript

Last but not least, Van Rossum praised TypeScript as a great language and noted that Python has added features such as optional static typing (or gradual typing, as it's also known).

In the beginning, van Rossum claims he didn't know about TypeScript and wasn't inspired by it because it hopped onto the “JavaScript bandwagon”.

In his view, TypeScript performed a few things that Python is still trying to figure out so nowadays we definitely look at TypeScript as an example."

Van Rossum says Python and TypeScript are learning from each other since the languages are similar.

3. Python creator's thoughts on Rust

According to Van Rossum, Rust is a good language for certain things and it has advantages over C++ in that it is more difficult to bypass the compiler checks and it solves the memory allocation problem nearly perfectly.

4. Python creator on Go language

According to Van Rossum, the Google-designed language Go is probably the most Pythonic of all the new general-purpose programming languages.

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