On that list, I only have first-hand experience with Uber. The Uber entry on that list links to a blog post from Uber engineering. This four-year-old blog post says:

  > We rip out and replace older Python code

How many other companies on that list also "use" Python the same way that Uber "uses" Python?

If you follow the link next to that text, it says that they're ripping out sync Python using Flask from their monolith and replacing it with async Python using Tornado in a microservice, though some teams are also exploring Go.

Which seems like an entirely reasonable way to use Python (no quotation marks needed), and exactly what I'm advocating - Python is a language where you can ship something today and reimplement it next year, also in Python, for the same engineering effort that you'd spend doing it once in a more highly structured language. Alternatively, you can reimplement it in another language. You can safely rip out and replace the original Python, because it's a language that optimizes for humans both reading and writing it.

And just about every place I've worked, business requirements are constantly changing, and the scale and structure of the company (and associated Conway's Law implications) are changing, and so code you write today is going to be tech debt in a year anyway. A language that encourages you to write outrippable code and makes it easy to replace it is your ally under these conditions.

(Put another way: Python is a language that is readable enough to avoid the https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... trap, which is fundamentally about code that is so complex that a human can't figure out all of what's going on and the only safe way is to treat the existing code as a relic.)

Again, I'm not saying this is the language for everyone to use for all cases. There are cases where you want to make the code a little harder for humans to read and write so that the computer can help you with things. If that is indeed your use case, go write Java! But I think there's plenty of stuff you can call "production-ready" that doesn't fit this particular mold.

I wrote that I have first-hand experience at Uber because I was ripping out that Python. There is no more Python, and certainly no more has been added in the four years since that blog post was written. Python is only for scripting data pipelines and automation. Almost everything else is Java/Go.

Python isn't only unwieldly because of dyanamic typing, but also because it eschews functional idioms. JavaScript is much better in this regard, and it makes the code much more maintainable.

Do you have any examples in mind?

Sure, `reduce()` was removed from the standard library between Python 2 and Python 3. Here is Guido arguing that `lambda` and several other functions should be removed as well.[1]

[1] https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196

> `reduce()` was removed from the standard library

Not true: it was moved from builtins to `functools` module, but it's still there.

He did, in fact, misspeak. functools is part of the standard library, and was part of the standard library in 3.0, and contained reduce: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.0/Lib/functools.py#...

What he meant to say is that it's removed from the list of builtins.