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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?

#181

Post by AndyKelley »

rick_2047 wrote: post #60
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…

You are not doing C, you are not doing C++, you are not doing Java. This is the best tip that could be given. In the SICP course in Berkeley CS class, the instructor puts it as "Don't ask me what the language will do if you do something stupid, the answer will always be either you would get an error or the computer will do something stupid. Don't try to convert java code into LISP, try to think in the language."

I had to solve a real problem in lisp before, and I tried, I really tried to think in lisp. But after hours of frustration with the language itself and the interpreter tools, I gave up, wrote python that worked in 10 minutes, tested it, and converted it to lisp by hand. At this point I was left with lisp code that worked, but may as well have been machine code for how readable it was to me.

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

#182

Post by AndyKelley »

mcav wrote: post #76
zepolen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really appreciate Python until you try and program in something like Java again. The following code is readable and I have required a variation of it in a program before: sorted([ord(c) for c in set('letters in this sentence') & set('and this one')], reverse=True) Doing it in Java would be a chore now.

Here's a translation of that to Clojure, since I'm learning that now: (use 'clojure.set) (reverse (sort (map int (intersection (set "letters in this sentence") (set "and this one"))))) Edit: Take two... (use 'clojure.set) (->> (intersection (set "letters in this sentence") (set "and this one")) (map int) sort reverse) (experienced lispers, feel free to make this more idiomatic)

I find the python code much more readable.

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

#183

Post by strlen »

thedigitalengel wrote: post #75
TrevorBurnham wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get what you mean by "toy language." Clearly some big, powerful, practical stuff has been written in it. Usually the phrase "toy language" is used to refer to those with little practical use. Java is unwieldy, but it has a rich ecosystem and compiles to very efficient code across a broad range of platforms. If you want Java without the unwieldiness, try Groovy. It's Java with a ton of syntactic goodness added…

As I said earlier. "Secondly I don't mean to criticize Java. By calling it a toy language, I was simply referring to the fact that Java tends to make writing bad code difficult, and in doing this takes away some of the flexibility and power that you tend to associate with other languages." Judging from the general reaction it seems I should not have used the term "toy language". My apologies if I ended up implying th…

> Java tends to make writing bad code difficult

If this were actually the case, it would be a bonus point for Java. It isn't, however. Nor is it the case for Python, Ruby or even BSDM languages like Ada.

How many times have you come (when searching for a used car or trying to reserve a table at a restaurant) to a slow, ugly, non-functional URL that creates an error message if you press the wrong button at the wrong time? Usually those URL ended in ".jsp", ".asp[x]" or ".cgi" or ".php".

I'd argue, that the largest amount of bad code that exists is in Cobol, followed by Java, C# and then C/C+, PHP and various BASIC dialects. That has nothing to do with how good those languages are but rather with the facts that most code out there:

a) is created by IT departments or outsourcing firms staffed by mediocre or completely disinterested programmers (I've never been in such an environment, but my hair stands up every time I read horror stories on dailywtf or on progit)

b) shouldn't have been created in the first place (there are commercial and open source packages that do this) if it weren't for the NIH symptoms. There are tons of restaurants with their own order/registration forms despite the fact that OpenTable is widely known and available. There are tons of non-technology companies writing their own accounting systems even though there's a multi-billion/year industry around that type of software (that employs programmers who understand not just J2EE but accounting itself as well).

c) is forced upon its users (due to the sunken costs fallacy) and thus isn't exposed to market forces

d) is written in those languages as they're most common and are either easy to learn (PHP, BASICs) or are widely taught in colleges or trade schools (Java, C#, C++)

Truth is, there is no magic language bullet. Some languages are more expressive, more pleasant to program in. Some produce faster code. Others are more scalable in the sense of making it possible to write whole systems in one language. Some are more "safe" in the sense of being less prone to garden variety security attacks, less likely to crash the entire machine when there's a bug (at the cost of imposing restrictive abstractions on the programmer).

No language, however, is a substitute for a team of competent and interested developers solving a relevant problem.

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

#184

Post by silvertab »

pjscott wrote: post #171
sreque wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of points. 1. I love python. 2. The OP was being a troll. 3. People need to be more honest about themselves and their favorite pet languages. I can write a sorted set in assembler too, if I wanted. However, there's been several times that I've wanted a sorted set data type while coding in Python but found that none was easily available. I hate the, "you can write your own!" counterpoint, because it is essent…

I didn't mean to imply that lacking a sorted set datatype wasn't a pain in the ass; I was pointing out that the lack of multiple set implementations is a tradeoff that we make for all built-in datatypes that could support other operations but don't. (Personally, I would love to have the ability to pick a random element from a set. That would be great.) By the way, in case anybody was wondering, here is a (relatively…

Couldn't you just do the following?

  from random import choice
  choice(list(myset))
(I'm guessing you'd want to do it without having to convert it to a list first?)

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

#185

Post by ewjordan »

dhimes wrote: post #133
donaq wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urgh, I learned Java in school and recently had to use Java at work to do some stuff with a bad XML schema (think lots of " " wtf is element "child" for??). I used XStream for it, and started off trying to write the objects the "right" way, i.e. with private members for child nodes and getters and setters for them. However, having drank deep of the Python well, I got about 20 minutes into it before I realised that my…

One thing to look out for here is this: if you are writing getters and setters for primitive data types like strings and ints and stuff you're doing it wrong. Instead of public Customer(String name, int custId) do public Customer(CustomerData cd) where CustomerData is an object. In Customer you would have getters and setters for CustomerData rather than each item that identifies your customer. This is for extensibili…

Now what I do, which goes against stated policy, is keep the CustomerData variables (String name, int custId, and so on) public so I can set them easily. The only time I require getters and setters for primitive types (for example, name) is if I were to read in data from a user generated form that needed to be sanitized.

It's funny, too - though this type of thing goes against best practices, the primary argument for always using getters/setters (some day you might need to validate input or do other sorts of logic, and it's a pain in the ass to put that in after the fact) is pretty much 100% shattered these days, because any IDE worth a damn makes it possible to switch from public field access to getters/setters in a couple of keystrokes ("Encapsulate field" and "Inline method" are typically all you need).

Though it's worth keeping in mind, most of the Java best practices tend to assume that you're writing code that other people will have to use, people whose codebases you won't have access to after you release your code, and that's a much more difficult context to program in. It requires a lot more bureaucratic nonsense to leave your API flexible when you have to worry about breaking other people's code with each edit you make, and extreme paranoia is more than justified when that's what you're worrying about.

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

#186

Post by [deleted] »

zepolen wrote: post #43
nudge wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main draw for me. Compared to Python, other languages (well, some) seem to require you to do so many things that just seem... unnecessary. I couldn't believe all the junk Java required of me when I took a stab at it. It's like being confronted with some unhelpful bureaucrat: I know what I mean, they know what I mean, but they're damn well going to make me trudge through all the nonsense so that what I mea…

You don't really appreciate Python until you try and program in something like Java again. The following code is readable and I have required a variation of it in a program before: sorted([ord(c) for c in set('letters in this sentence') & set('and this one')], reverse=True) Doing it in Java would be a chore now.

[deleted]

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

#187

Post by cageface »

mkramlich wrote: post #149
cageface wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python and Ruby are very much alike but I find Ruby more ergonomic. It's more consistently object-oriented, which means I spend less time looking things up because the core is easier to remember. The syntax is more expressive, which makes my code shorter and easier to read. The consistent use of blocks everywhere is more intuitive and consistent than Python's mix of loops and comprehensions. I find I can take in a bl…

You gave a great comment. I get almost completely the opposite take on Ruby versus Python though: There are a number of things that made me think Ruby was made by a less astute designer. The 'end' everywhere feels bad in a world where I know both "}" and a newline can accomplish the same thing but with less typing and screen clutter. Also do not like Ruby's dropping of ()'s from fn call statements, because it blurs t…

Ruby certainly has some rough edges. I don't find the redundancy of end/} a big deal in practice but I do wonder what Matz was thinking when he put them both in the language. The omission of parentheses from function calls can occasionally add some confusion but it makes uniform access to properties transparent without the property hack that Python had to add to accomplish this. It seems like Python has had to add a lot of new, non-orthogonal stuff over the years to catch up to what was elegantly possible in Ruby from the beginning.

People sometimes do go overboard with DSLs in Ruby too but the big problem I have with Python code is that it all looks the same. The shape of Ruby code is usually a good indicator of what it's doing, partly thanks to DSL. Python seems to have gone just far enough in making all code look the same to defeat quick visual intuition. Why not take it a step further and get a completely regular, homoiconic syntax and all the Lisp-y benefits it brings?

To me Ruby hit the sweet spot exactly between Lisp and Perl. If I had to code in Python I wouldn't hate it though. There are far worse languages.

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

#188

Post by Goladus »

asher wrote: post #99
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.

All the popular scripting languages "do" the same things. But I prefer Ruby to Python (while still liking Python) because it feels more programmer-friendly. Ruby: a = %w( apple pear orange ) Python: a = [ "apple", "pear", "orange" ] Ruby: a=%q/O'Malley says "Hello"/ Python: a = "O'Malley says \"Hello\"" Python lets you use "'" or '"' as the delimiter, which solves 80% of these cases - but why not generalize the conce…

While it's true that "last expression in a function" is not technically ambiguous, because of python's statement/expression distinction leaving off the return can lead to unclear code.

For example, if there's a function composed entirely of print statements, the last expression evaluated will be the expression in the last print statement executed. But, that means you have to know that 'print' is a statement and not an expression, and that the right-hand side of the print statement is in fact an expression.

In ruby, actions like prints and assignments are side-effects and always evaluated as expressions. So if puts is the last expression in a function you'll get the return value of puts (which is usually nil I believe). That's pretty simple.

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

#189

Post by wycats »

sreque wrote: post #157
mcav wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a translation of that to Clojure, since I'm learning that now: (use 'clojure.set) (reverse (sort (map int (intersection (set "letters in this sentence") (set "and this one"))))) Edit: Take two... (use 'clojure.set) (->> (intersection (set "letters in this sentence") (set "and this one")) (map int) sort reverse) (experienced lispers, feel free to make this more idiomatic)

Not sure why we are posting alternative language implementations, but here is the Scala version :). You could say that this was an exercise for me in learning 2.8, which I am unfamiliar with. A for comprehension isn't needed because Scala already treats Strings as a sequence of characters. (Set("letters in this sentence":_* ) & Set("and this one":_* )).toSeq.sorted.reverse Or you, can take advantage of Scala's rich c…

An easier Ruby solution would be:

("letters in this sentence" + "and this one").chars.sort.reverse

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

#190

Post by prodigal_erik »

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…

> it makes things like copying & pasting code from web pages etc far more difficult

This. I'm convinced half the reason Ruby is displacing Python is that it's actually practical to talk about Ruby code in forums without ridiculous little-known workarounds like pastebins.

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