Python

My small Python (~100 lines of codes) codes aren't maintainable, but I'm happy with them. I don't ever plan to work on serious projects with Python, so I can't say much about it's maintainability. But, from limited experience, I'd rather use C++, C#, or in my special case, G'MIC if maintainability matters to me.

There's one key qualifier in this sentence: I know. One's skill set matters, I guess...

It's not too bad if you strictly enforce Pyright, Pylint and Black.

But I have yet to work with Python code other than my own that does that. So in practice you are right.

My work uses python and it hasn't been bad for new code that has tests and types. Old code we inherited from contractors and "yolo startup" types is less good, but we've generally be improving that as we touch it.

i had the misfortune once of having to try to understand a >400kLoC python codebase in a critical position and let me tell you that maintainability is a Problem. the system was older than most of the best practices of today and had a structure i can only describe as "a duolith of sqlalchemy soup".

Python has typing hints which mypy uses. It's similar to something javascripts wants to introduce call type annotations. It also has linters and formatters (ruff which does the work of multiple tools in one and is very fast). It also has unit tests built in as well as popular test libraries like pytest and nox and tox for running tests.

It is up to the maintainers to use the tools they have been given to make projects maintainable. I have worked on and seen very maintainable python projects of various sizes. While legacy code is always a bit of a nightmare (python 2 and < python 3.6), it doesn't have to be that way and getting into a python project nowadays is way easier than most other languages I've tried (maybe also because it's what I know well).

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