Credit: Professor Edward Emerson Barnard at Yerkes Observatory, in Williams Bay, Wisconsin., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Here we go again. The tech sphere is buzzing, Medium articles are dropping, and the Python community is collectively celebrating the “revolutionary” features coming in Python 3.15.

I read through the latest feature announcements, and as someone who has spent over four decades in IT, 3 of them writing Perl code, I couldn’t help but smile. For years I have felt like Python is essentially just Perl for folks who found Perl “too indecipherable”. But Python it seems to me has become a Frankenstein monster born out of someone’s irrational fear of curly braces and sigils (that’s @$% for you Pythonistas).

And looking at the Python 3.15 changelog, it is clearer than ever: Python is not really innovating, it’s just improving itself by borrowing concepts that Perl has embraced like…forever.

Let’s take a look at the “groundbreaking” features in Python 3.15.

1. The “Lazy Import” Revolution

Python 3.15 introduces lazy import syntax to speed up initialization times. The idea is simple: don’t load a heavy module until the exact moment you actually need to execute it - because you might not need to.

Revolutionary, right? Except Perl developers have had require and autouse for decades. Perl solved dynamic, on-demand loading back when developers realized milliseconds (and size) matter when running web applications. No special syntax proxy; Perl just trusts the programmer to know when to pull things into memory (and complains loudly if they forget).

2. Flattening Nested Data

Python is now touting the ability to use *group unpacking inside list comprehensions so that developers can finally flatten nested lists without writing confusing, double for-loop syntax.

Meanwhile, in Perl: @flat = (@list1, @{$list2}, %list3).

Lists just flatten. By default. Perl doesn’t make you go through hoops (or loops) or wait for a major version bump to accomplish something as mathematically fundamental as combining arrays. And for more exciting ways of manipulating arrays see List::Util!

As much as I hate to see Perl bolt on too much syntactic sugar, some of the features of List::Util should have been part of the language. The compromise was adding List::Util to core in Perl 5.7.

3. Immutability

Python 3.15 is finally adding frozendict as a built-in type to give developers a truly immutable dictionary. I’m sorry, but frozendict? Is that supposed to be some kind of locker room humor? I can’t wait for Python 3.16 to introduce limpdict and of course the corrupted hash - soredict.

Immutability is a good idea, especially for configurations. But watching Python incrementally bolt on data-locking mechanisms rings a bell. I think I’ve heard this one before. constant?, Readonly?, Hash::Util::lock_keys? Buehler? Anyone?

4. Help! I Have a Syntax Error!

When a developer accidentally tries to use JavaScript syntax in Python (like .push() instead of .append()), Python 3.15 will now catch the error and politely suggest the correct method. I think this says something about the average Python developer by the way if they really need this feature. I suppose (hope) it’s aimed at Python newbies. But it is also a very polite, modern echo of Perl’s use diagnostics; (which almost no Perl programmer today would leave in production code and probably doesn’t even need while developing new code!).

The Final Assessment

Python is fine (I guess). It has clearly won the popularity contest in the data science and ML spaces (and yes I’m jealous). These 3.15 updates - including a new Tachyon sampling profiler (see Devel::NYTProf) and a much stronger JIT compiler - are genuinely good improvements.

But let’s be honest, stripped of the marketing hype, Python is on a trajectory as predictable as Halley’s Comet. It morphed from a minimalist, heavily opinionated scripting language with OWTDI (one way to do it) into a language that is now appeasing developers looking for TIMTOWDI (there’s more than one way to do it)!

Python is begrudgingly bolting on the things I’ve always appreciated about Perl. It’s actually annoying to watch, especially since these are the exact same features Python developers originally claimed to hate about Perl.

Feature Comparison: Python 3.15 vs Perl

Python is finally catching up. Maybe in another 76 years, they’ll discover the power of @_.