Episode 69: Python is Dead. Long Live Python! With the Creators of pandas & Parquet

Episode 69: Python is Dead. Long Live Python! With the Creators of pandas & Parquet

From Vanishing Gradients by Hugo Bowne-Anderson

February 3, 2026 · 55 min

About this episode

The episode discusses the future of programming languages in the context of AI development, featuring insights from the creators of pandas and Parquet.

> It’s the agent writing the code. And it’s the development loop of writing the code, building testing, write the code, build test and iterating. And so I do think we’ll see for many types of software, a shift away from Python towards other programming languages . I think Go is probably the best language for those like other types of software projects. And like I said, I haven’t written a line of Go code in my life. – Wes McKinney ( creator of pandas Principal Architect at Posit) , Wes McKinney , Marcel Kornacker , and Alison Hill join Hugo to talk about the architectural shift for multimodal AI, the rise of “agent ergonomics,” and the evolving role of developers in an AI-generated future. We Discuss: * Agent Ergonomics: Optimize for agent iteration speed , shifting from human coding to fast test environments, potentially favoring languages like Go ; * Adversarial Code Review: Deploy diverse AI models to peer-review agent-generated code , catching subtle bugs humans miss; * Multimodal Data Verbs: Make operations like resizing and rotating native to your database to eliminate data-plumbing bottlenecks ; * Taste as Differentiator: Value “taste” —the ability to curate and refine the…

People in this episode

Host: Hugo Bowne-Anderson

Guests: Wes McKinney, Marcel Kornacker, Alison Hill

Topics covered

  • agent ergonomics
  • AI-generated code
  • software development
  • multimodal AI
  • adversarial code review
  • data operations

Keywords

  • Python
  • Go
  • agent ergonomics
  • adversarial code review
  • multimodal data
  • software development
  • AI
  • pandas
  • Parquet

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: pandas, Posit, Go

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