Julia for Data Science? Ha! I think Julia might maybe have a shot at the space Matlab plays in the moment. But I'd define that more as scientific computing than data science. Does Julia even have a properly supported HBase interface? People are confused about how to connect to SQL Server [1] - until some pretty basic things like that are sorted out I don't think anyone will take it seriously for data science. Also: h…
Ask HN: Is Python dying?
321–330 of 369 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#322Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#323That may be a view through the distorted HN lenses. Spend some time on Lambda the Ultimate and you'll think imperative programming is dying. Go is new and has lots of issues. It's annoying on many fronts and badly needs improvements in packaging area. It's good for some things and worse for others. JS is for frontend, because it's the only supported language. (although there are python-to-js compilers available if yo…
My prediction is that one day some alternative Python interpreter (Stackless, or GIL-less, or which compiles ahead of time to machine code, or something like that) will go from being merely an interesting concept to a dominant runtime. Python is such an excellent language, and it only has a small handful of elements holding it back from being even better. I feel like eventually something has to give, and either there…
However I want to see packaging addressed as well, if not first.
Unfortunately packaging has gotten so wonky, it is easier for me to shove my small projects into huge docker containers and liberate my sysadmins from maintaining virtual environments on servers. Servers that need to be rebuilt with more modern versions of gcc and other system libs.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah they will still probably be labeled as dead man walking for the next 20 years long after your FP langue de jour will have outlasted it's pristine days and got damned to hell by the devs having to maintain the programs written in it. Don't get me wrong if you are currently doing consultancy business for a niche FP language far for me to blow the wistle to companies that instead of paying your fees and hefty salar…
I don't think so, this time: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_pro... "My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are payi…
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
My prediction is that one day some alternative Python interpreter (Stackless, or GIL-less, or which compiles ahead of time to machine code, or something like that) will go from being merely an interesting concept to a dominant runtime. Python is such an excellent language, and it only has a small handful of elements holding it back from being even better. I feel like eventually something has to give, and either there…
I completely agree. Fixing the run time would be a large effort to addressing one of the big complaints. However I want to see packaging addressed as well, if not first. Unfortunately packaging has gotten so wonky, it is easier for me to shove my small projects into huge docker containers and liberate my sysadmins from maintaining virtual environments on servers. Servers that need to be rebuilt with more modern versi…
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#326Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're working a problem capable of being solved by two $10/mo DO VMs, you're working a problem that can be solved in /any/ language.
I'm amazed by the number of people that declare the shared mutable state of the current languages as their bottleneck. You'd think everybody is suddenly working with realtime stream analysis on huge datasets and are battling millions of concurrent users these days. My thinking is that if you are so popular you can afford maybe to start 20 more 5$ instances. And really I find it hard to think of problems that cannot b…
Writing multi-pthreaded Java apps is not my idea of a good time. I am very interested in Elixir, but at the same time recognize that in reality I use Python. And if folks want to knock themselves out writing multithreaded Java apps... to go use Java.
I think the Node model for most, if not almost everything, fits needs well with its single-threaded event loop and scaling by process. Explicitly spinning up pthreads should be reserved for systems-programming, and in which case you are probably going to be using C(++)/Rust(?).
>You'd think everybody is suddenly working with realtime stream analysis on huge datasets and are battling millions of concurrent users these days.
I almost want to archive this somewhere or put it on a plaque next to my desk.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think so, this time: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_pro... "My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are payi…
Well I don't think functional languages are something new and by reading the latest death and doom I'd wonder how we ever got this far and why suddenly it's so much harder to do concurrency. I confess that I don't write low level software for lunar modules but just the regular enterprise stuff and having worked with high level concurrent constructs like ConcurrentHashMap, LinkedBlockingQueue, RingBuffers on the jvm I…
Functional paradigms/languages, and immutable values, and controlling side effects, greatly help with that, in my front-line coding experience. Therefore, I am a fan.
Do you enjoy doing needless extra work? In other words, are you a little bit lazy? (in the Larry Wall "laziness/impatience/hubris" sense). If so, you should be at least trying out functional paradigms and see if they work for you like they have for pretty much everyone else who has taken them on.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#329Yes, Python is dying, that's why it just moved up in the Tiobe rankings to #5, displacing PHP (which obviously no one ever uses): http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... It's dominance of science is why Python has 25% science talks this year at PyCon, and why we see articles like: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3012442/application-develop... But yes, if you didn't know any languages, then of…
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#330Python is the least-worst general purpose imperative not-performance-critical OO scripting language. It has lots of problems (weird scoping, community issues, roundabout docs, `''.join()`, crippled lambda, no variable declarations, some lousy naming, module distribution issues, yet more ways to do string formatting, whitespace-sensitive syntax instead of curlies+semis), but the alternatives have worse problems, so Py…
What's wrong with `''.join()`? It's fine as is, I think, same logic as '{}'.format().
`','.join(pieces)` just seems unnecessarily weird, and present simply for OO's sake. Not everything needs to be some object's method.