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Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

talkpython.fm

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Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#21

Post by aidos »

Rapzid wrote: post #5

I've recently had to start writing python professionally and I'm not super impressed. My previous python experience was writing small services and fixing others code. Now that I'm working on larger "apps" it feels like a 90's language with all the rough edges and warts. I'd rather being working in a language with better language services and tooling, but python has numpy and all these data viz libraries so whatcha go…

Interested to hear more specifics of the issues you have – "language services" isn't a term I've heard before.

My feeling is that the python language is still one of the nicest around. It takes quite a bit of practice before you get good at writing it though. Distribution etc is a bit rubbish, but you normally go through that pain once and then just leave it alone.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#22

Post by mkesper »

greyman wrote: post #10
daveguy wrote: post #4

The unofficial python 2.8 is here: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

But didn't Guido say that everything what could be backported was already backported? > There are a small handful of backwards incompatibilities introduced by Tauthon. How to understand this? Anyway, something like this was expected to happen. I wonder if it wouldn't be better if Guido would not halt python 2 development and just let it evolve.

This discussion goes now on since Python 3 was released. Python 2 will not be supported or developed after 2020.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#23

Post by anentropic »

pmontra wrote: post #13
DodgyEggplant wrote: post #3

After years with Python, it's still a mystery to me how the same constructs are so intuitive and readable in Python (think it acceptable that they are less in C++, Java or javascript etc, even Ruby)

It might depend on your previous history. My development arc was C, Perl, Java, Ruby, Python with Javascript in parallel. Python is not particularly intuitive after 10 years of Ruby. Actually it's a mistery to me how people can like such a complicated language. However I got only customers using Python last year so I must make me like it at least a little. I keep thinking I could have been very unlucky and found some…

It's just what you know, coming from the other direction I found Ruby ugly and plenty of warts of its own. But I'm aware this is just a subjective impression and they're broadly very similar.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#24

Post by throwayguestman »

Rapzid wrote: post #5

I've recently had to start writing python professionally and I'm not super impressed. My previous python experience was writing small services and fixing others code. Now that I'm working on larger "apps" it feels like a 90's language with all the rough edges and warts. I'd rather being working in a language with better language services and tooling, but python has numpy and all these data viz libraries so whatcha go…

> there are just fundamental issues with the lang and language services

I'd rather listen to a podcast going in-depth on that theme.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#25

Post by fnord123 »

donquichotte wrote: post #11
Rapzid wrote: post #5

I've recently had to start writing python professionally and I'm not super impressed. My previous python experience was writing small services and fixing others code. Now that I'm working on larger "apps" it feels like a 90's language with all the rough edges and warts. I'd rather being working in a language with better language services and tooling, but python has numpy and all these data viz libraries so whatcha go…

It IS a 90s language! ;-) My main issue with Python is distribution. Oh, you're using it on Windows? No worries, just install matplotlib using pip. Oh wait, you need to install cygwin and a C compiler and for some weird reason it won't compile but no worries there is a website with Unofficial Windows Binaries for Python Extension Packages but it's still not working.... Numerical computations and plotting are also my…

Windows still doesn't come with a C compiler? At least it finally comes with ssh, right?

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#26

Post by crdoconnor »

Rapzid wrote: post #5

I've recently had to start writing python professionally and I'm not super impressed. My previous python experience was writing small services and fixing others code. Now that I'm working on larger "apps" it feels like a 90's language with all the rough edges and warts. I'd rather being working in a language with better language services and tooling, but python has numpy and all these data viz libraries so whatcha go…

I've maintained technical debt ridden code for most of my career - initially in C#, Javascript, also doing PHP and Java. Python is the only language for which it was remotely bearable.

It has some warts (it is weakly typed in some respects) but the only languages that fix those warts have a pale shadow of Python's ecosystem and you typically cannot prototype as fast in them.

As for tooling, it's probably got the best REPL (IPython) of any language.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#27

Post by steinuil »

Rapzid wrote: post #5

I've recently had to start writing python professionally and I'm not super impressed. My previous python experience was writing small services and fixing others code. Now that I'm working on larger "apps" it feels like a 90's language with all the rough edges and warts. I'd rather being working in a language with better language services and tooling, but python has numpy and all these data viz libraries so whatcha go…

I had to work with Python a few times in the past year and I really have to agree. The lack of proper lambdas, closures, its reliance on mutable data structures and imperative idioms, and the useless distinction between statements and expressions makes it feel like somebody was trying to write a modern language but for some reason stopped halfway.

For example: you can't assign the result of an "if" statement. Why? Because it's a SyntaxError, no real reason. There is even an "ifExp" in the language grammar, but that's only for inline ifs.

You can't have statements in lambdas, and map and filter are "unpythonic". Yet everybody feels like list comprehensions are the best thing after sliced bread, despite being the same thing.

Closures are also clunky: you can define another named function inside a function and call it afterwards, and you can use functools.partials from the stdlib, but I think people feel like it's unpythonic and instead pollute the namespace with singleton classes that only have one method.

Ultimately, to me it feels like this all hurts the composability of the idioms of the language. List comprehensions can be nested, but they feel clunky and they're in a syntactical wall garden. You can compose expressions, but not statements.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#29

Post by Certhas »

steinuil wrote: post #27
Rapzid wrote: post #5

I've recently had to start writing python professionally and I'm not super impressed. My previous python experience was writing small services and fixing others code. Now that I'm working on larger "apps" it feels like a 90's language with all the rough edges and warts. I'd rather being working in a language with better language services and tooling, but python has numpy and all these data viz libraries so whatcha go…

I had to work with Python a few times in the past year and I really have to agree. The lack of proper lambdas, closures, its reliance on mutable data structures and imperative idioms, and the useless distinction between statements and expressions makes it feel like somebody was trying to write a modern language but for some reason stopped halfway. For example: you can't assign the result of an "if" statement. Why? Be…

I extensively use closures in Python, particularly jit compiled closures with numba. I don't really have any problems with that, why do you say it's unpythonic?
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