HACKER Q&A
📣 dpflan

Is the "AI Boom" a Python Boom?


There was a recent post about top programming languages of 2025. And Python was at the top. We see so much development in the AI space focused on Python projects. Understandably, the ecosystem and AI/ML/CUDA/research ecosystem trends heavily towards Python, but is Python truly serving as the language for this boom? I see some ideas where compiled, "safer", and faster languages with concurrency as a first paradigm along with LLM-assisted programming could make these language better suited for adoption and foundation building for performant AI/ML future. There is just so much Python inertia, it can seem hard to not choose during this time period.

I was wondering what the HN community thinks about this, just musing about how Python is a workhorse language, possibly a junk-drawer language, depends on your perspective.


  👤 k310 Accepted Answer ✓
IMO, there's a race/land grab going on, and what gets you in the race fastest wins.

All other concerns fade.

Just my $0.02


👤 grim_io
Python has stable and mature libraries for all kinds of use cases, without the churn of JavaScript, without the stigma of Java and without the bad taste of Microsoft. It is the default choice for a good reason.

👤 not_your_vase
Python serves as an established, mature glue language that's relatively easy to learn. But of course even in Python, if some heavy lifting needs to be done, that happens in C/C++, and precompiled as a native binary object, with a Python layer on top of it for the users.