Petition to Abandon Python as a Teaching and Professional Language

We, the undersigned, urge universities and professional organizations to reconsider the use of Python — both as a teaching tool and as a language for production environments.

While Python is often praised for its beginner-friendly syntax, this superficial simplicity hides a deeply flawed, chaotic, and outdated ecosystem that becomes a liability the moment one steps beyond trivial scripts.

In educational settings, Python teaches students how to survive broken environments rather than how to program effectively. Dependency hell, version conflicts, the absurd coexistence of pip, venv, pyenv, conda, and virtual environments that break unpredictably — these are not the lessons that should define a first encounter with computer science. Python does not teach programming; it teaches coping mechanisms for a dysfunctional platform.

But the situation is even more dire in professional contexts.

Python is a productivity black hole in real-world software development. Its dynamic typing introduces entire categories of bugs that go unnoticed until runtime. Its performance is orders of magnitude slower than compiled languages. Concurrency is hamstrung by the GIL. Deployment is fragile, brittle, and platform-dependent. Even the simplest of tasks, such as freezing or packaging a program for distribution, often require third-party tools duct-taped together with inconsistent community support.

In the workplace, Python encourages quick hacks over solid architecture, technical debt over maintainability, and patchwork tooling over long-term solutions. While it's occasionally ""useful"" for prototyping or scripting, it is woefully inadequate as a foundation for robust, scalable, and secure systems.

We must stop pretending that Python is a one-size-fits-all language. It isn’t. It’s a dead-end when used beyond its very limited sweet spot.

Students deserve to learn programming, not frustration.
Professionals deserve tools built for engineering, not improvisation.
It’s time to move on.