What language is universally better than Python? I don't think Python is perfect, but it is definitely one of the best languages out there. It is elegant and it is has a huge ecosystem of libraries, frameworks and tutorials. There is a lot of battle-tested software in Python that is running businesses.

> cost of significantly better languages is essentially free

Is it? We still need meatspace humans to vet what these AI agents produce. Languages like C++ / Rust etc still require huge cognitive overhead relative to Python & that will not change anytime soon.

Unless the entire global economy can run on agents with minimal human supervision someone still has to grapple with the essential complexity of getting a computer to do useful things. At least with Python that complexity is locked away within the CPython interpreter.

Also an aside, when has a language ever gotten traction based solely on its technical merits? Popularity is driven by ease-of-use, fashion, mindshare, timing etc.

Your stance is aggressive and provocative, but no less so than the challenge AI poses to software developers in general. I think what you say should be seriously entertained.

And as someone who loves Python and has written a lot of it, I tend to agree. It's increasingly clear the way to be productive with AI coding and the way to make it reliable is to make sure AI works within strong guardrails, with testsuites, etc. that combat and corral the inherent indeterminism and problems like prompt injection as much as possible.

Getting help from the language - having the static tooling be as strict and uncompromising as possible, and delegating having to deal with the pain to AI - seems the right way.

That's an interesting take, but I'm not sure 'easy to write' is the only advantage.

There is also a really good ecosystem of libraries, especially for scientific computing. My experience has been that Claude can write good c++ code, but it's not great about optimization. So, curated Python code can often be faster than an AI's reimplementation of an algorithm in c++.

I feel like this is a relatively hot take. Python has advantages beyond being easy to write. It's simple. It can do just about anything any other language can do. It's not the most performant on its own, but it's performant enough for 99% of use cases, and in the 1% you can write a new or use an existing C library instead. Its simplicity and ease of adoption make python very well represented in the training data.

If I ask an LLM or agentic AI to build something and don't specify what language to use, I'd wager that it'll choose python most of the time. Casual programmers like academics or students who ask ChatGPT to help them write a function to do X are likely to be using Python already.

I'm not a Python evangelist by any means but to suggest that AI is going to kill Python feels like a major stretch to me.

EDIT: when I say that Python can do anything any other language can do, that's with the adage in mind. Python is the second best language for every task.

Isn't that also an advantage for LLMs? Apart from more available data.

Let's see how it plays out. My current assumption is that degrees and CVs will become more important in the workplace. Things like good architecture, maintainability, coherence, they are all hard to measure. A true 10x developer without a college degree will lose to the PhD without any hard skills. And these types only speak python, so they will instruct the AI to type python. Or maybe they'll vibecode rust and elixir, I don't know. But the cynic in me strongly thinks this will make all our bullshitty jobs way more bullshitty, and impostors will profit the most.

It's such a laughable take. First of all a language is never getting popular simply because it's good. Actually most used languages are usually terrible.[0]

Secondly it's non factual. Python's market share grew in 2025[1][2][3]. Probably driven by AI demand.

[0]: even truer for natural languages.

[1]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular...

[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...

[3]: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

hilariously bold take with no evidence to support the claim

Absolutely agree with this. I'm hoping via advent of agentic, Rust dominates in the next few years. It may even cause Wasm to be dominant as the new "applet" language.