My previous job didn’t have a ticket tracker for my team. It was my first real job, so I didn’t realize how far we were straying from best practices. If I had some more experience, I would have pushed hard for ticket tracking. I was constantly disorganized, and my manager blamed me for not keeping track of everything. He was probably in his 50’s, he should have known better.

All of this is very true! But it’s has to stack up against the large amount of experience with Python, both personally and in the industry. I have had to make decisions on project languages with an eye towards the abilities not just of myself, but of other people on my team. Fortunately, someone who knows Rust recently transferred onto my team, so we may do a project in Rust soon.

I would be torn between Python and Rust.

The case for Python is that I’m already very experienced in it (nearly 20 years), there’s a good job market out there for it, and the ecosystem is one of the best in existence. It’s like a comfortable well made jacket, maybe a tad worn in some areas but very functional. And it’s not standing still, with a community that’s committed to constant improvement.

Rust is more fun. I like the way it’s been put together. It can also be used in more areas. There are some niches (wasm, low level, kernel) where Python just doesn’t work. It has been able to benefit from the years of mistakes from Python and other languages on things like how it handles Unicode strings. I don’t know it as well as Python, but I barely get a chance to work with it so that could change quickly in time.