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Why People Should Learn Python

iluxonchik.github.io

31–40 of 329 posts

Re: Why People Should Learn Python

#31

Is it just my feeling or are there languages which are preferred on HN? Indicators for languages which are liked by the HN community: - Positive stories get many upvotes and are instantly at the top of HN - Most comments are positive - Frequent coverage on HN about the language Indicators for languages which are not liked by the HN community: - Rants get many upvotes and are instantly at the top of HN - Most comments…

But you writing this as a bad thing? It's normal for a community to pick tools/solutions that are preferable.

A lot of HN users are for example startup owners/creators so it's normal that they will prefer easy and semi-automated language like Python.

Re: Why People Should Learn Python

#32
post #28

Why you shouldn't learn Python: 1. In-consistant syntax. 2. The language uses exceptions to control flow of logic. 3. Divided community, since Python 3+ included breaking changes to the standard. 4. Un-discoverable APIs. You better hope the documentation is bulletproof else the API could change in any which way during runtime. 5. Poor error messages. If an import goes wrong you are not told why, and so on. 6. Ultimat…

Name a single language that covers all those things and has a pretty syntax.

01000010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00111111 00001101 00001010?

Re: Why People Should Learn Python

#33

Is it just my feeling or are there languages which are preferred on HN? Indicators for languages which are liked by the HN community: - Positive stories get many upvotes and are instantly at the top of HN - Most comments are positive - Frequent coverage on HN about the language Indicators for languages which are not liked by the HN community: - Rants get many upvotes and are instantly at the top of HN - Most comments…

HN has language preferences, sure. Of course it does - people have language preferences, and some languages really are better than others - no wonder our aggregate likes some languages more than others. I don't agree with every specific of your star-rating, and a more objective measure would probably be more useful (I'm sure I've seen charts of which topics are popular or not on HN), but of course HN has preferences. Why wouldn't it?

Re: Why People Should Learn Python

#34

Why you shouldn't learn Python: 1. In-consistant syntax. 2. The language uses exceptions to control flow of logic. 3. Divided community, since Python 3+ included breaking changes to the standard. 4. Un-discoverable APIs. You better hope the documentation is bulletproof else the API could change in any which way during runtime. 5. Poor error messages. If an import goes wrong you are not told why, and so on. 6. Ultimat…

8. Significant whitespace. Not only is it a constant minor inconvenience when editing the program, it makes it very hard to cut-and-paste code fragments on the web.

Re: Why People Should Learn Python

#35
post #34

Why you shouldn't learn Python: 1. In-consistant syntax. 2. The language uses exceptions to control flow of logic. 3. Divided community, since Python 3+ included breaking changes to the standard. 4. Un-discoverable APIs. You better hope the documentation is bulletproof else the API could change in any which way during runtime. 5. Poor error messages. If an import goes wrong you are not told why, and so on. 6. Ultimat…

8. Significant whitespace. Not only is it a constant minor inconvenience when editing the program, it makes it very hard to cut-and-paste code fragments on the web.

"Making it hard to copy-paste code from the web" is something that I would consider a feature, to be honest.

Re: Why People Should Learn Python

#36

Why you shouldn't learn Python: 1. In-consistant syntax. 2. The language uses exceptions to control flow of logic. 3. Divided community, since Python 3+ included breaking changes to the standard. 4. Un-discoverable APIs. You better hope the documentation is bulletproof else the API could change in any which way during runtime. 5. Poor error messages. If an import goes wrong you are not told why, and so on. 6. Ultimat…

1. a matter of tast

2. care to elaborate ?

3. it's not divided, it's evolving from 2 to 3. Java's community is under Oracle's grip, don't know if it's any better...

4. it's not because you can do it that it's worth to do it, so in practice API are just not changing at runtime

5. I can say the same of my industrial strength Java environment...

6. Not a problem since what you do doesn't require speed

7. Ever used PyCharm ? I wouldn't say it's poor tooling. The debugger is fine. What I miss is something like a good profiler to look at running code.

But I'd say :

8. Optional typing should've been there from day one, it'd made code editor, tooling better

9. The date/time handling is not good

10. SOA support is weak (and in the kind of setting I am, we use tons of XSD, WSDL, XML, security, signature you name it)

Re: Why People Should Learn Python

#37

Is it just my feeling or are there languages which are preferred on HN? Indicators for languages which are liked by the HN community: - Positive stories get many upvotes and are instantly at the top of HN - Most comments are positive - Frequent coverage on HN about the language Indicators for languages which are not liked by the HN community: - Rants get many upvotes and are instantly at the top of HN - Most comments…

At a glance, it looks like all languages are reasonably well loved except PHP and Node.js (shouldn't this just be Javascript? Does having a different standard lib make it a different language?)

I think that's due to people having flash backs to terribly written code in both languages.

For example, PHP apps pre-2005 rarely if ever used frontend controllers, preferring instead to twine in configuration and helper functions into isolated pages that were directly served by Apache. This meant that there was no single obvious place to put things like caching.

Additionally, once upon a time, PHP didn't really have well developed ORMS, so everyone just wrote queries and hopefully parameterised queries---but not always. So if you had a hobby project that took off, then within 3 years it'd be a roiling ball of mud where it's difficult to do basic things like tracing which calls happen per page.

PHP came to prominence early in the web, and it was easy to use so everyone had a hobby project that took off, or had to work within something like that. Hence the hate.

To compare it to Javascript, I think the disdain for both languages is due to their initial nature---they were both written over an short period of time, and evolved in spurts rather than being carefully designed from day one or designed to overcome the shortcomings of another language.

The quality of the above really shows up in the inconsistency of the standard libraries, and the fact that certain semantics were inconsistent or danger zones in practice but couldn't be changed.

---

I do remember though when everyone hated C, and loved C++, then went back to loving C... so maybe programmers are just fickle and none of what I said makes sense. :)

Re: Why People Should Learn Python

#38

Is it just my feeling or are there languages which are preferred on HN? Indicators for languages which are liked by the HN community: - Positive stories get many upvotes and are instantly at the top of HN - Most comments are positive - Frequent coverage on HN about the language Indicators for languages which are not liked by the HN community: - Rants get many upvotes and are instantly at the top of HN - Most comments…

What I find interesting is that we are so quick to follow new trends.
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