Reflections and predictions on how Python will evolve in 2023, by Gleb Kisenkov, Software Engineer at Godel Technologies. 

What are the biggest trends in Python you have seen over the past year? 

Last year, we spoke about an increase in open-source software, especially around the topic of sustainability and how it isn’t a complete solution ‘free lunch’. 

Although open-source software is unlikely to drive innovation, it’s gaining more and more weight in supporting it. I think that open-source software will likely be increasingly used by major companies to outsource their QA and UX efforts to the community while core decisions and code contributions will come from and be backed by the companies, finding some kind of middle ground between closed-source and open-source models. 

What should Python developers do to stay ahead of customer expectations? 

We have always emphasised that python engineers should take on a broader role in software development such as helping with the frontend or CI/CD or DevOps tasks. Deep knowledge is usually not required, but having the bigger picture of the whole product can be beneficial. 

Cross-functional teams are at the core of Agile and DevOps philosophies which have been steadily increasing their presence for years. So most likely the trend will continue to permeate more and more industries and communities. Also, the IEEE programming language popularity index (one of the major ones) states that there’s an increased demand for Python (and other programming languages) developers that have good SQL skills.  

What are your predictions for where Python is heading in 2023?

  1. Based on lots of well-known programming language popularity surveys it’s evident that Python has gained a stronghold in the market and is going to at least sustain its position as one of the world’s most loved and used programming languages. 
  1. Prediction based on the Python development roadmap and a couple of studied interviews with Guido van Rossum, there will be an increased focus on improving sub-interpreters’ functionality for better support of parallelism and other general performance tunings to the interpreter. 

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