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Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

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Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#301

Post by jononor »

koyote wrote: post #119
salex89 wrote: post #81

Using it as my main language: Python (2.7). How the hell did this thing become so popular? I've used it for all sorts of stuff earlier, less complex than the other. Scripts, devops, ETL... But then I got into a company that is using it for some quite serious stuff, a large codebase. Holly smokes this thing does not scale (in terms of development efficiency and quality) well. I swear at least 70% of our bugs is becaus…

Hah, I had the same thought when I first started using Python for some personal stuff many years ago. I enjoyed using it and it was quick to get some code out but I thought to myself "surely if you build anything large with this language it will be a massive pain to maintain". Fortunately(?), I never worked for a company that used it for a large codebase so I never found out if my assumption was correct or not.

You need a QA strategy to match the technology in use. No static type checking means many mistakes will need to be caught in another way. For instance with automated tests, or design-by-contracts. Which might also catch some things that static typing would not cover.

In a non-trivial system with solid engineering, QA concerns quickly go beyond details like which programming language is used. Like how to QA entire systems, sub-system interactions, ensure low time from bug discovered in production to fix deployed, eliminating recurring sources of issues etc.

But if the culture that caused the choice of a dynamic language is "oh its just so much easier and productive to not have to write types all the time!", then you are going to be in for some serious mess and pain in a larger system. That is not a technical problem with dynamic typing/language though :)

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#302

Post by mattigames »

spricket wrote: post #260
clintonb wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really so bad? At edX all of our services were Django. After the third service was created we built templates in Ansible and cookiecutter to create future services and standardize existing ones. We created Python libraries with common functionality (e.g. auth). We were a Django shop. Switching to SOA didn’t mean switching languages and frameworks.

If your services were all setup the same, what was the big advantage to have them separate? Wouldn't you get the same scalability from running 10x of the monolith in parallel with a lot less work?

haha I see you haven't worked with edx, basically a lot of services just go down and the main reason to have them separated is so they don't ALL go down, insights/metrics service infamously is hard to get up and steady.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#303

Post by jononor »

jononor wrote: post #301
koyote wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, I had the same thought when I first started using Python for some personal stuff many years ago. I enjoyed using it and it was quick to get some code out but I thought to myself "surely if you build anything large with this language it will be a massive pain to maintain". Fortunately(?), I never worked for a company that used it for a large codebase so I never found out if my assumption was correct or not.

You need a QA strategy to match the technology in use. No static type checking means many mistakes will need to be caught in another way. For instance with automated tests, or design-by-contracts. Which might also catch some things that static typing would not cover. In a non-trivial system with solid engineering, QA concerns quickly go beyond details like which programming language is used. Like how to QA entire sys…

As another example, consider unsafe/safe like C/C++ versus Java/C#/Rust. Serious systems are built in C (cars, airplanes, medical devices) and it can be done OK - but it requires serious investment in QA, targeted at weaknesses of the language.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#304

Post by hackinthebochs »

JimDabell wrote: post #253
hackinthebochs wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but white space just is not one of them. This position is hard to maintain after you've spent an hour trying to debug a nonsensical error just to realize you opened the python file in an editor that used a different tab/space setting than the file was created in. Significant whitespace is one of the biggest misfeatures in programming history.

I've been writing Python for over 20 years, and I don't think this has happened to me one single time. I'm not some kind of super programmer; I make as many mistakes as anybody else and spend too long debugging stupid mistakes occasionally. I've mixed spaces and tabs before on a handful of occasions, and it's always told me straight away what the problem is. Here is an example of mixed spaces and tabs for indentation…

It's nice when it does offer that specific error, but I've burned many hours over the years when it fails to recognize that as the issue.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#305

Post by hackinthebochs »

goto11 wrote: post #223
hackinthebochs wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but white space just is not one of them. This position is hard to maintain after you've spent an hour trying to debug a nonsensical error just to realize you opened the python file in an editor that used a different tab/space setting than the file was created in. Significant whitespace is one of the biggest misfeatures in programming history.

Surly that could only happen if you used a mixture of tabs and spaces for indentation.

The point is that if you open a file with a different editor it was created with, its very easy to mix tabs and spaces without any kind of indication that that's what is going on.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#306

Post by lukifer »

spudlyo wrote: post #146
lukifer wrote: post #7

Rich Hickey's "Value of Values"[0] is what finally sold me on the benefits of pure functional programming and immutable data structures. (It remains horrifying to continue working with MySQL in my day job, knowing that every UPDATE is potentially a destructive action with no history and no undo.) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6BsiVyC1kM

Often times MySQL is set up with auto-commit set to true, where every DML statement (like UPDATE) is wrapped in an implicit BEGIN and COMMIT. It doesn’t have to be that way though, you can manage the transaction yourself, and you don’t have to COMMIT if you don’t want to, you can undo (ROLLBACK) if necessary.

It’s true, transactions in MySQL work great. But once the change is committed, the previous value is overwritten permanently. If the user wants to undo five minutes later, or I want to audit based on the value a month ago, we’re hosed unless we’ve jumped backflips to bake versioning into the schema.

I think Hickey’s comparison to git is apt: we don’t stand for that in version control for our code, why should we find that acceptable for user data?

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#307

Post by yashap »

Bahamut wrote: post #289
yashap wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I agree with you in general, integration tests that are really focused on the contract between two services can be pretty easy to debug, ESPECIALLY if you use request ids that are passed between services, and included in every log. It’s often a matter of simply searching for the request id in your logs and quickly seeing what happened. E2E UI tests are definitely hard to debug though, in most cases. They sti…

Totally agreed - the problem is when integration tests are used in lieu of what unit tests are for, which has been an increasing trend in the frontend web world I’ve seen, in large part because of UI frameworks not providing the tools to do testing well.

Definitely. E2E UI tests are almost always brittle, flakey and hard to debug, you want a very small number of them just to test really core workflows. Drives me crazy too when I see frontend devs using them like UI unit tests, while writing no actual unit tests.

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#309

Post by targafarian »

nikofeyn wrote: post #298
anyfoo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using python 3 with mypy, which provides (optional) static typing, and my gosh has it reduced the time I spend looking for stupid problems by orders of magnitude. I got a somewhat direct comparison when I mypy-ified a small program where I used a lot of async and await (basically implementing own event loops and schedulers, it was interfacing very custom hardware that handled very different but interacting…

as a serious question, why even use python if you have to go through hoops to make it work even half as well as other languages? are you reliant upon some python only library?

> go through hoops

mypy and types are only "hoops" in comparison to non-annotated Python (in terms of added syntax / coding effort), yet compared to explicitly typed languages where you have to declare types, that's just standard thing you have to do so there is no extra effort in comparison to these other languages (and then the judgment that it only works "half as well" is controversial (Edit: or at least needs qualification)).

Re: Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?

#310

Post by nikisweeting »

nikofeyn wrote: post #298
anyfoo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using python 3 with mypy, which provides (optional) static typing, and my gosh has it reduced the time I spend looking for stupid problems by orders of magnitude. I got a somewhat direct comparison when I mypy-ified a small program where I used a lot of async and await (basically implementing own event loops and schedulers, it was interfacing very custom hardware that handled very different but interacting…

as a serious question, why even use python if you have to go through hoops to make it work even half as well as other languages? are you reliant upon some python only library?

My experience when switching to other languages is "why do you have to go through so many hoops to make this work even half as well as Python"...
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