TL;DR: Python tooling has been a fragmented, slow mess for years. The revolution didn’t come from within the ecosystem: it came from Rust. uv, Ruff and ty — all written in Rust by Astral — have replaced half a dozen tools and are between 10x and 100x faster. Looks like the Cult of Ferris had a point after all. Have you ever tried to explain to someone how to install dependencies in Python? ...
Last week I was profiling a Swift app with Instruments. Standard procedure: xctrace record, xctrace export, copy the XML to Claude Code’s context, ask it to find the hotspots. Claude responds: “The XML is too large, I can’t process it reliably.” 33,553 lines of XML. For a program with two functions. The real problem xctrace export is a fantastic tool. It gives you everything: every sample, every backtrace, every frame with its binary, memory address, and UUID. It’s exhaustive, precise, and complete. ...
“You know what’s great about Rust? It doesn’t let you compile crappy code. You know what sucks? Everything you write at the beginning is crappy code.” — Mr. Krabs, probably What’s better than an AI agent? An AI agent rewritten in Rust. If you’ve spent more than five minutes on the internet, you’re aware of the meme. It doesn’t matter what project—text editor, DNS server, BMI calculator. Someone will inevitably comment, “you should rewrite it in Rust.” It’s the Rewrite It In Rust—RIIR for friends—and it’s as unavoidable as gravity. ...
The awakening of slowness You’ve been working on your data science project for a while. You have twenty notebooks, a few images, and the typical folder structure that seemed like a good idea three months ago. You run git status to see what you’ve changed and… you wait. And wait. And while you wait, you have time to wonder if the computer froze or if it’s just contemplating life. Spoiler: it’s not contemplating. It’s suffering. ...
The problem: teaching what you haven’t taught yet I have a programming course with 47 classes. Each class has notes (where I explain concepts) and labs (where students practice). And I have a problem: sometimes I use concepts in labs that I haven’t explained in the notes yet. “Okay, in this exercise use map to transform the list.” The problem? I don’t explain what the hell map is until three classes later. ...