I think the only way MS knows how to make money is lock someone into an ecosystem. I think their next attempt should be a closed source lean checker that has will have proprietary code for NL -> lean formalization checker.
This should be called Python Type Server Protocol, no? Seems weird to mine the generic protocol namespace for a protocol that only supports Python. Especially coming from the company behind LSP, which actually is generic.
As someone with minimal knowledge of LSP specifics, I'm a bit confused about why this exists. Is it the case that LSP alone does not provide adequate functionality for Python type queries?
It seems to be a more structured representation of the type. Normally in LSP you'd have a plain string or markdown that you render in the IDE, but nothing that you can analyse structurally.
It's a shame it's not just an LSP extension though, or a feature in a newer LSP version. LSP is maintained by Microsoft engineers.
Language server protocol is the interface of a software piece that sits between an IDE and a language toolchain so you don't need to change code in the IDE to add support of new languages (you add support on the LSP server). Then server provides things such as completions/intelli-sense, navigation to definitions and some correction checking. From the anouncement TSP extends LSP for better python type awarness.
languages with dynamic types will be obsolete thanks to AI, you heard it here first. It is just introduces more errors, with AI you want formal checking, sure static types are not that, but it is a small piece of it. If 10 percent of errors are types, with a typed language keeping everything the same you have 10 percent less errors, simple as that.
So basically adding machine readable type-at-point queries as an lsp extension so Pylance and Pywright can be separated?
The 'result types'format is super python specific, like not having a for all binder. I don't think this specific schema will be used for any non-python languages.
It's such a shame python got such mindshare. It's a disaster of a language and ecosystem that people keep bolting and hacking things that much better thought out languages have had for decades.
I remember falling in love with Python when I first learned it at version 1.5, liked it even more with 2.0, but when 3.0 came around, that's when I noticed the ecosystem falling apart. Not for the obvious incompatibility schism: I do think most of 3.0's changes were good ones, and it finally is the standard default version now, but in many other ways it feels like the ecosystem has still never really recovered. Virtualenv is still the same grotesque hack, where rather than doing what other languages like Perl and Ruby do and making some wrapper around setting PYTHONPATH, it relies on python's behavior of locating the library path relative to the install, thus hardlinking a whole python installation in and making you "activate" it first. That nothing has managed to replace it in 20 years speaks volumes.
Roughly the time when Guido stopped fighting the hordes. The hordes won, wrested the language away from its creator and now they own the pieces. 2 to 3 was the worst possible way a language has ever been upgraded bar none. Hilariously, even today Python 2 persists in many places because of this.
I'm hoping one day people look at Python the same way they look at Perl and PHP.
There has been so much programming language innovation in the past decade that I'm surprised someone hasn't built a better Python. I'd like to see something like Rhai or Roto take off which has a natural upgrade path to Rust.
Maybe it's because interpreted languages just aren't in vogue anymore and probably won't be for a long time if humans aren't even coding anymore.
At this point, Python is less of a programming language by itself but more of an interop protocol between various C/C++/Fortran/Rust binaries. But again, it's just part of the cycle, Python was a breath of fresh air 10 years ago when academia is still dominated by Matlab, but now it is mostly a mess of a language that's good for throwaway scripts but not very convenient for large software projects compared to statically typed languages.
Pretty much every other mainstream language bar JS. I'd say also Ruby because I also do not like a lot of its choices, but there's at least a kind of heady elegance to it in a REPL, though I would never want to work on a production system written in Ruby.
Frankly, I just really prefer statically and strongly typed compiled languages.
I did my last company's first Demo and MVP in Python after running through the Koans at my co-founder's behest and ultimately we decided that the production system would not be done in Python. There are some cool things about it - specifically I do like that annotations are real AOP seams, but the numerous footguns and lack of types and a compiler just make it a very annoying ecosystem to work in for me.
I don't agree at all that it's a coke/pepsi situation. That analogy is for when two mostly-interchangeable choices develop tribal followings based largely on personal preference. Coke and Pepsi are both caramel carbonated soft drinks that are terrible for your health differing only slightly in flavour. Otherwise they're materially identical.
C# is strongly/statically typed, compiled, and quite fast (after the vm has started), whereas python is weakly/dynamically typed, interpreted, and generally slow as fuck. Those are two fundamentally different languages, how could it possibly be a coke/pepsi situation?
I think python is fantastic for certain use cases: gluing other tools together (like LAPACK or other ancient libraries), system automation, prototyping, exploitation (I think pretty much all of us were working on stealmybitcoin in python), and exploratory data analysis.
The problems arise when people try to write, say, gigantic GUI applications in python, or really anything with CPU-bound workloads. Part of being an engineer is using the right tool for the right job. Python is the wrong tool for lots of jobs. That shouldn't be a controversial statement.
Numpy is over 2 decades old. Pytorch is a decade old. Python devs know what "right tool for the job" means and focus on solving problems instead of being language purists.
And the thing that maddens me the most is that it has a critical mass where it’s basically the default starting language and most people never really move from there. And so we’re stuck with this grotesque abomination that somehow keeps on rolling. The amount of money that was poured into python to make it barely bearable is probably the GDP of a small nation.
It's incredibly easy for new engineers to pick up. On the spectrum between "features easy for beginners but nightmarish for experienced engineers" and "features complex for beginners but great for experienced engineers" it always makes the tradeoff for the former.
Go is awesome and has great ecosystem. I think if you want to just deliver Go is one of the best language out there. Of course as long as the project makes sense(I.e no client side/GUI stuff, there it gets messy)
It can do everything, it's a nightmare to write correctly and is so full of warts that really only a mother could love it.
Go is "elegant" and properly designed, which leads to fundamental unassailable limitations; like its GUI story or writing a backend for other languages (cgo is so slow and -build-mode=c-shared is a hog).
No operator overloading makes it difficult for numerical/scientific work - Python is stronger here.
"just get stuff done" is your crappy dump truck which is welded together out of spare bits and is barely hanging on, this is how I feel about C++.
Go is a lot more elegant and well designed, but it requires "smooth roads" (An OS and Runtime) and goes fast... it's more like a Dodge Hellcat..
EDIT: if we consider speed a function of development time rather than runtime, of course at runtime C++ can be as fast as it gets.
The dump truck that is C++ definitely goes just as fast if not faster than that Hellcat, though.
To me it seems more like C++ is the metal shop's old school 3-axis mill: effective and dangerous. Can do almost anything, including easily maim you unless you're continually vigilant.
Go seems like a CNC machine: just as effective, much less dangerous because it relies on digital safeguards and embedded controllers. You need to go to extreme lengths to make it do something it wasn't designed to do.
Python seems like lego. Shit simple to build things with, lets you start building immediately, fantastic for prototypes, but finished product is still just press-fit plastic bricks
It's definitely a better language than Matlab, and Numpy made it actually fast for that purpose. AI research really took advantage of that even before LLMs hit the scene.
It was the first language that actually felt ready-to-use, available for free-as-in-speech. Batteries included, robust online development community, sensible featureset, main libs that were designed bottom-up instead of top-down. I remember learning Java 1.2 or 1.4 after learning Python and it felt like a huge regression. Swing was a joke compared to TkInter (which was weak compared to proper GUI editors like VB but at least made nice scalable native-feeling GUIs and had a sensible API) and the standard collections were miserable without generics.
But Python peaked like 20 years ago. The later features were too ugly, and it was too slow to fill the obvious gaps in the language.
Marketing in academia, decent C-API that led to use in scientific Python.
The language is a disaster since it deviated from its original purpose. The community is ruled by insane, mediocre narcissists who drove away all reasonable people.
I've been thinking recently, there's hardly any reason not to use a native language like Rust anymore. The classic reasoning for languages like Python is that it prioritizes developer time and resources over compute resources, but now developer time is rapidly trending to zero and everything is compute dominated.
Python had no corporate backing, no marketing, it became popular because people actually like to use it. Sorry you've only been using "better thought out languages" instead.
As a Ruby dev I'm kind of primed to hate on Python a little bit, but I have to agree. I've written some Python over the years, I've tried to like it, but it just doesn't feel good to me. There are things that are really great about Rust, Elixir, C#, Swift, Java, Common Lisp... Sometimes it's the standard library, sometimes the package manager, sometimes a feature (borrow checker, pattern matching), sometimes a principle (everything is an object, the code is just data). In Python, everything is kind of meh. Like they came up with the list comprehension syntax and that was it for cool things.
List comprehensions? Really? I remember when they were pretty and I was learning them alongside other languages with higher order functions and Python's approach seemed to be the ugliest of its cohort. They were neither as logical as simple Lispy "take a function as a parameter" things like Ruby, nor were they the kind of clean and legible stuff we expect from Python.
I'm not saying I personally like them, but they're not as bland as the rest of the language. FWIW, I watched 3 non-dev people around me learn Python in uni (biologist, lawyer, graphics designer) and they all liked the list comprehension syntax.
I work in python. It's only real and big issue is the slow interpreter. Everything else is resolvable one way or another. The only other big issue it has is the envy of people who imagine that if not for python, their beloved language would be as used as python is now. Most of their beloved languages are older than python or when they were created, they had much bigger ticket backing than python and those languages are still not where python is. The reason? Python is made to solve the issue one has now, not the issue one might have in the future. Local optimum at its best and worst. And honestly, most people have the current issue to solve and rarely reach the imaginary issue to be. If python didn't exist, it would have been invented.
Venvs, activate, deactivate, shitty scripts hacking on $PATH. How did this ever ship? Then there was poetry, `uv`, and maybe something in else in $CURRENT_YEAR.
Try to set it up on a new macOS, go on. Install a package from pip, and there's a bunch of garbage that won't let you do it.
It's horrible. Python packaging engineer is now an FTE, maybe that's what they wanted.
The syntax and meaningful spaces are annoying. The dynamic typing is abused to hell in everything including the standard library. It has wacky paradigms like "exceptions instead of conditionals" or having "else" clause for loops.
It lacks decent packaging and by design cannot handle multiple versions of dependencies or perform metadata-only/declarative resolution. To resolve the dependencies of a Python package you need to install it. Many Python packages resolve their dependencies imperatively depending on the current system state. When you need binary dependencies like numpy it gets even worse since libpython doesn't have a stable ABI.
It is one of the most underdesigned languages but it holds a dear place due to being easier to translate from pseudocode to actual implementation. This resulted many academics to pick it up and write advanced math libraries in it.
- https://docs.basedpyright.com/v1.40.2/type-server/
- https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/discussions/718...
Ty (the type checker maintained by astral) however will apparently support the TSP: https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/discussions/23432
Perhaps the post title could use a tweak
It's a shame it's not just an LSP extension though, or a feature in a newer LSP version. LSP is maintained by Microsoft engineers.
The 'result types'format is super python specific, like not having a for all binder. I don't think this specific schema will be used for any non-python languages.
Perl 6?
I can't imagine how anyone can complain about this. The community revolted. The team listened. What else do we want?
There has been so much programming language innovation in the past decade that I'm surprised someone hasn't built a better Python. I'd like to see something like Rhai or Roto take off which has a natural upgrade path to Rust.
Maybe it's because interpreted languages just aren't in vogue anymore and probably won't be for a long time if humans aren't even coding anymore.
You don't have to activate a venv to use it; `$VENV_PATH/bin/python3` just works.
(It also softlinks/symlinks the binaries.)
What languages are you thinking of specifically when you mention better thought out ones?
Frankly, I just really prefer statically and strongly typed compiled languages.
I did my last company's first Demo and MVP in Python after running through the Koans at my co-founder's behest and ultimately we decided that the production system would not be done in Python. There are some cool things about it - specifically I do like that annotations are real AOP seams, but the numerous footguns and lack of types and a compiler just make it a very annoying ecosystem to work in for me.
C# is strongly/statically typed, compiled, and quite fast (after the vm has started), whereas python is weakly/dynamically typed, interpreted, and generally slow as fuck. Those are two fundamentally different languages, how could it possibly be a coke/pepsi situation?
I think python is fantastic for certain use cases: gluing other tools together (like LAPACK or other ancient libraries), system automation, prototyping, exploitation (I think pretty much all of us were working on stealmybitcoin in python), and exploratory data analysis.
The problems arise when people try to write, say, gigantic GUI applications in python, or really anything with CPU-bound workloads. Part of being an engineer is using the right tool for the right job. Python is the wrong tool for lots of jobs. That shouldn't be a controversial statement.
What do you attribute Python's success to, in spite of being a disaster of a language and ecosystem?
Apparently you can't be a senior dev unless you "just here to deliver"
It can do everything, it's a nightmare to write correctly and is so full of warts that really only a mother could love it.
Go is "elegant" and properly designed, which leads to fundamental unassailable limitations; like its GUI story or writing a backend for other languages (cgo is so slow and -build-mode=c-shared is a hog).
No operator overloading makes it difficult for numerical/scientific work - Python is stronger here.
"just get stuff done" is your crappy dump truck which is welded together out of spare bits and is barely hanging on, this is how I feel about C++.
Go is a lot more elegant and well designed, but it requires "smooth roads" (An OS and Runtime) and goes fast... it's more like a Dodge Hellcat..
EDIT: if we consider speed a function of development time rather than runtime, of course at runtime C++ can be as fast as it gets.
To me it seems more like C++ is the metal shop's old school 3-axis mill: effective and dangerous. Can do almost anything, including easily maim you unless you're continually vigilant.
Go seems like a CNC machine: just as effective, much less dangerous because it relies on digital safeguards and embedded controllers. You need to go to extreme lengths to make it do something it wasn't designed to do.
Python seems like lego. Shit simple to build things with, lets you start building immediately, fantastic for prototypes, but finished product is still just press-fit plastic bricks
I'll give Python one thing though, it is by far the most elegant way to glue together a large number of otherwise incompatible C libraries.
Cross platform interpreter.
NumPy and SciPy really set the stage.
But Python peaked like 20 years ago. The later features were too ugly, and it was too slow to fill the obvious gaps in the language.
The language is a disaster since it deviated from its original purpose. The community is ruled by insane, mediocre narcissists who drove away all reasonable people.
- Reasonable ergonomics for describing data flows, as long as you never run the code, which you often don't care about if you're a mathematician
- Adoption by people who optimize pumping citations, not reproducible results -- non-working code is a feature when you're trying to BS
I work in python. It's only real and big issue is the slow interpreter. Everything else is resolvable one way or another. The only other big issue it has is the envy of people who imagine that if not for python, their beloved language would be as used as python is now. Most of their beloved languages are older than python or when they were created, they had much bigger ticket backing than python and those languages are still not where python is. The reason? Python is made to solve the issue one has now, not the issue one might have in the future. Local optimum at its best and worst. And honestly, most people have the current issue to solve and rarely reach the imaginary issue to be. If python didn't exist, it would have been invented.
Venvs, activate, deactivate, shitty scripts hacking on $PATH. How did this ever ship? Then there was poetry, `uv`, and maybe something in else in $CURRENT_YEAR.
Try to set it up on a new macOS, go on. Install a package from pip, and there's a bunch of garbage that won't let you do it.
It's horrible. Python packaging engineer is now an FTE, maybe that's what they wanted.
It lacks decent packaging and by design cannot handle multiple versions of dependencies or perform metadata-only/declarative resolution. To resolve the dependencies of a Python package you need to install it. Many Python packages resolve their dependencies imperatively depending on the current system state. When you need binary dependencies like numpy it gets even worse since libpython doesn't have a stable ABI.
It is one of the most underdesigned languages but it holds a dear place due to being easier to translate from pseudocode to actual implementation. This resulted many academics to pick it up and write advanced math libraries in it.
"unhinged" take
Pylance + Pyrefly: bring your preferred type checker to Visual Studio Code
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/announcing-tsp/
Pyrefly + Pylance Integration in VS Code
https://pyrefly.org/blog/pyrefly-pylance/
Why don't you spend your resources on F# instead of this nonsense?
Absolutely!
F# is criminally under-invested in.