I'm Switching to Python and Actually Liking It

Summary

I started to code more in Python around 6 months ago. Why? Because of AI, obviously. It’s clear (to me) that big money opportunities are all over AI these days. And guess what’s the de facto programming language for AI? Yep, that sneaky one.I had used Python before, but only for small scripts. For example, this script scrapes metadata from all videos on my YouTube channel. The metadata is dumped as a JSON file that I use to nicely display statistics of the videos on this static page. As you can see here, this little script runs in solo mode every Monday via GitHub Actions. Doing this kind of thing in Python is just way more convenient than, say, using Batch. Not only because the syntax is more human-friendly, but also because the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros. Isn’t that cool?So yeah, Python is powerful, and it couples very well with the now ubiquitous VSCode editor. But I didn’t treat it seriously until recently, it was just after I wanted to build AI applications (RAG, Agents, GenAI tools, etc.) for the “real world” that I realized that whether you like it or not, Python is the language of choice for that matters.So I decided to give it a serious try, and to my great surprise, I’ve found that Python, and everything around it, has really improved a lot over the last decades.Here’re just three examples:Python has created a very complete ecosystem of libraries and tools for processing and analyzing data.Python has gotten faster with optimized static compilers like Cython.Python has done a good job of hiding its legacy ugliness (such as __init__, __new__, and similar aberrations), swettening its syntax to accomodate developers with good taste.Thanks to this and many other things, I’m now feeling a particular joy for the language.However, during this time, I’ve found that there’s still a big gap between using Python for “production-ready” apps vs. the usual Jupyter notebook or script-based workflow.So in this post, I share the tools, lib...