> CPython feels like a house of cards, burdened by a legacy of bad engineering decisions it cannot get rid of anymore
At PyBay last year, I ended up with a knot of Python core devs talking about this problem, and talking about building a better, more portable API for native modules. The transition would be nasty (the 2->3 transition was..scarring), but it would solve this problem at a stroke.
> I very much prefer Python over JavaScript for example, but even then it wouldn't cross my mind
I would encourage you to at least check out Anvil (https://anvil.works). It's more than a Python->JS compiler; it's a reimagining of what the web as a platform could look like.
FWIW, I agree with you that it's a bad idea to swap out JS for Python at one layer, while keeping the rest of the stack intact. It's extra complexity, and it doesn't solve the actual problem with the Web, which is the sprawling complexity of the stack and all the weird frameworks that work around it (while themselves making the problem worse).
The Big Idea of Anvil is to replace all those different layers of abstraction with one big, coherent abstraction. That's one reason why we deliberately chose Python rather than JS, so that users wouldn't reflexively reach out and break that abstraction every time they Googled how to do something.
Anvil looks really interesting, and I appreciate your free forever tier, but I think you're missing a hobbiest tier.
I'd be concerned about investing too much effort in case my project strayed over one of the limits and I have to either pay £39 or kill the project. Whereas I would pay £5 without even thinking about it for access to all the libraries and perhaps a handful of emails etc etc.
Once I'm paying the £5, I can see my requirements potentially growing to reach £39/m but as a hobbiest I'd definitely never get there without stepping stones.
At PyBay last year, I ended up with a knot of Python core devs talking about this problem, and talking about building a better, more portable API for native modules. The transition would be nasty (the 2->3 transition was..scarring), but it would solve this problem at a stroke.
> I very much prefer Python over JavaScript for example, but even then it wouldn't cross my mind
I would encourage you to at least check out Anvil (https://anvil.works). It's more than a Python->JS compiler; it's a reimagining of what the web as a platform could look like.
FWIW, I agree with you that it's a bad idea to swap out JS for Python at one layer, while keeping the rest of the stack intact. It's extra complexity, and it doesn't solve the actual problem with the Web, which is the sprawling complexity of the stack and all the weird frameworks that work around it (while themselves making the problem worse).
The Big Idea of Anvil is to replace all those different layers of abstraction with one big, coherent abstraction. That's one reason why we deliberately chose Python rather than JS, so that users wouldn't reflexively reach out and break that abstraction every time they Googled how to do something.