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I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

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Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

#111

Post by samdk »

asher wrote: post #107
exit wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

curious what you prefer about Ruby. i'm very familiar with python, and have only looked at Ruby long enough to decide (mistakenly?) that it wouldn't do anything for me which python doesn't already.

Given a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]: Ruby: a.map{|i| i+1}.reject{|i| i%3 == 0}.map{|i| i*i} Python: [i*i for i in filter(lambda i: i%3 != 0, [i+1 for i in a])] Please ignore the fact that the whole operation can be simplified mathematically - nontrivial map-grep-map operations do occur. I find the Ruby version clearer because it proceeds from left to right like a shell pipeline.

I see your point, but I think your Python's not terribly idiomatic and that's a big part of the problem.

This is easier to read and understand, only goes through the list twice, and loses nothing in terms of power:

    [j*j for j in [i+1 for i in a] if j%3 != 0]
(And for any given operation, there's very possibly a cleaner way to abstract out the inner list comprehension, which would again make it a lot nicer.)

In general, I don't see much of a reason to use filter/map/etc in Python: weak lambdas mean they're not terribly powerful. List/sequence comprehensions can do everything they can do with cleaner syntax and/or fewer operations.

This, I think, is actually at the core of this whole discussion. The Ruby/bash approach makes sense if you're used to working with sequences like Ruby/bash do. The Python approach is more natural to me though, because I've written a lot of Python. (And having spent the last year writing a lot of Ruby, I still find the Python approach cleaner/easier to understand at a glance.)

Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

#112

Post by fgf »

TrevorBurnham wrote: post #68
[deleted] wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I hate to get all meta, but as of this writing the parent comment has -2 points. I understand that comments that just say "Interesting :)" are frowned upon on HN because they add no information. However, in this case the commenter is the OP. He's expressing thanks for a lengthy, informative response. "Thanks for responding, that's an interesting perspective" is not a class of comment that deserves downvotes. It's com…

I agree, it's probably going to be much more satisfying to give long answers if those can be rewarded with something more than an impersonal upvote. It's a mistake to not let those who ask questions post short "thank you" replies.

Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

#113

Post by arghnoname »

thedigitalengel wrote: post #23
amix wrote: post #4

Yesterday there was an interesting link on HN comparing NLP in Python vs. other languages: http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/howto/nlp-python.ht... . I think this article shows the clearness of the Python language - - and this clearness and simplicity is the reason why I love to code in Python.

I agree that short python samples are as clear as a high level language can possibly be. Implementing algorithms, for instance, becomes incredibly easy in Python. I face problems when Python programs get above a certain length. I've done some Django programming in the past. A view gets a request object (pardon me if I'm wrong or if this has changed recently) and is supposed to then render the response (or something s…

This is something I run into with perl/php/python/ruby/etc too. Perhaps I've just gotten used to outsourcing some of my brain to the compiler, but I really like to lean on it to get good results. Run-time blow-ups suck, and I've always preferred using a compiler to writing all these test cases to catch run-time type errors.

I really like using a dynamic language for some tasks. I almost never use C, C++, or Java for any task I hope to start and complete within a day. Those jobs are small enough it's easy to keep track of what you are passing around.

I spent 6 months writing all of my utilities in Python. I tried very hard to like it, but it just didn't tickle my fancy. I do like perl and ruby for a dynamic language. I think perhaps the issue is, if you are like me and you don't like using dynamic languages for large programs, the extra clarity of python isn't enough of a added bonus.

Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

#115

Post by Lewisham »

japherwocky wrote: post #104
gte910h wrote: post #51

I'm a guy from a C/C++ background who did linux kernel development, and picked up python along the way and used it to do desktop tools. I used python (without knowing any of it) to write a disassembler for a project I was doing in 2003 on a non-x86 processor. It took me 5 days to learn the language enough to do so and to write the entire tool, at which point I "got it". First off, Java isn't a toy language. You've ch…

""" Java is a bureaucratic language. You have to cross your t's dot your i's, fill out your requests in triplicate at the FactoryFactoryFactory to get the objectOfYourDesire. """ This is such an absolutely fantastic way of succinctly describing why I dislike Java so much. Bureaucratic! Absolutely fantastic post, get this on a blog somewhere. I seriously wish I could upvote you more.

It's also a great way of specifying why I love it. Having been bitten on the ass one too many times by typing problems in a Python project, the feeling of confidence I get from doing the Java bureaucracy (to some extent mitigated now I do Scala instead) is something I have really come to love.

It's like a security blanket for me.

Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

#116

Post by cageface »

asher wrote: post #107
exit wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

curious what you prefer about Ruby. i'm very familiar with python, and have only looked at Ruby long enough to decide (mistakenly?) that it wouldn't do anything for me which python doesn't already.

Given a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]: Ruby: a.map{|i| i+1}.reject{|i| i%3 == 0}.map{|i| i*i} Python: [i*i for i in filter(lambda i: i%3 != 0, [i+1 for i in a])] Please ignore the fact that the whole operation can be simplified mathematically - nontrivial map-grep-map operations do occur. I find the Ruby version clearer because it proceeds from left to right like a shell pipeline.

I find the Ruby version clearer because it proceeds from left to right like a shell pipeline.

This is an excellent point. Ruby code can be some of the cleanest, most readable functional code there is. I have these kinds of chained pipelines in my Ruby code all over the place and they're much easier for me to follow than similar expressions in Lisp or Haskell and than Python's comprehensions.

Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

#117

Post by zephyrfalcon »

I've been using Python since around 1996. Back then I had used, or was still using, C, C++, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, BASIC (groan) and assembler.

Python was so much more high-level than all these other languages that it was staggering. It was pretty weird to use it at first. Where are all the declarations? What are these "lists" and "dictionaries"? You mean I can just stick any old thing in an object or even a class? Etc.

Soon it became obvious how much more powerful this new language was, and I enjoyed replacing reams of Pascal/C code with a few lines of Python. I tried to use it at work too, but failed because it was considered "unmaintainable" by the powers that were (this was around 1999-2000). Of course, this just fueled the feeling of having an obscure but superior language rebelling against the big evil statically typed empire. :-)

Anyway, this used to be some of the appeal of Python. I suppose it still applies to some extent, although since then, Python has been passed left and right by languages that are more powerful, more flexible, more functional, more "fun", and whatnot. Nowadays there seems to be a meme going around claiming that e.g. Ruby is fun and flexible, while by contrast Python is boring and conservative. It wasn't always like that. I distinctly recall people discovering Python and exclaiming that "programming is FUN again!".

Then again, all of these things are in the eye of the beholder, mostly. If you don't like Python, no big deal, especially if you have both lower-level (C, C++) and higher-level (Lisp) languages at your disposal. (Personally, I used to think that Ruby was butt-ugly and uninteresting... these days, I have taken more of a liking to the spirit of the Ruby community, which (perhaps ironically) reminds me of Python's in the 1990s.)

Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

#118

Post by koenigdavidmj »

maw wrote: post #66
nailer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use auto indent on python all day. Not having to perform secondary bracket mark up is great.

You don't, because auto indent for python doesn't and can't exist.

Vim does pretty well. On starts of blocks (when I hit : followed by return) I get an indent. At the usual places that would end a block (return, raising an exception, break or continue) I get a dedent automatically.

Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

#119

Post by sbov »

cageface wrote: post #70
jsankey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood this objection. Do you not indent your code anyway? If so, why should you also need to delineate scopes in another way? Python allows you to choose your indentation, it just requires consistency: something that is always required by coding standards (with good reason). If there was a command line switch, would you use it? Why?

Python's whitespace indentation seems like a great idea until you realize that it makes things like copying & pasting code from web pages etc far more difficult and, worse, makes automatically reindenting a block of code in an editor impossible. If I come across a badly formatted block of code in Ruby or Java or C in emacs it takes me one keypress to sort it out. In Python I have to carefully, manually look at each l…

I'm willing to forgive the creators of Python if they didn't optimize their syntax for copying-and-pasting code.

Hotfixing is a naturally perilous process regardless of language. I've spent hours tracking down untested hotfixes in Java.

You're also probably less likely to come across a badly formatted block of python code because that would generally result in a bug. Much like misplaced brackets in Java/C/C++ would result in a bug.

It doesn't make the code magically better. It makes it less redundant. Indentation should already be there, why do you need curly brackets?

Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

#120

Post by neutronicus »

I don't much like it either.

Came from C++, learned Perl, got a job writing Fortran, learned Lisp. When hating on Perl came into vogue on the internet, I said to myself, okay, I will learn Python as a Perl replacement. It is a decent Perl replacement, what with all the libraries and the fact that it is shebang-able.

Now that I've dispensed with background, what I don't like about Python:

1. Assignments don't return values. I hate this. An example. I would like to write:

    if (m = re.match("woo, regular expression")):
        do some stuff with match object
Instead

    m = re.match("woo, regular expression")
    if m:
        do some stuff with match object
This obscures the fact that I only care about this match object if it evaluates to true.

2. List comprehensions kind of suck. [(a, b) for a in as for b in bs] is a cartesian product and not a zip? Really?

3. Loops don't help this either: There's no equivalent of the Lisp (loop for x in xs for y in ys do (stuff x y)). I have to explicitly loop over the index. This pisses me off.

4. I feel that I am generally shoehorned into creating and assigning more objects than I would like.

Honestly it seems kinda crippled in comparison to Lisp, which, by the way, runs faster.

I would go back to Perl if multidimensional arrays were not so godawful. Perhaps I should try Ruby.

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