Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ruby is incredibly flexible, whereas Python is not. Often times my idea of the way things should be done is not Guido's idea, and so Python seems a bit lacking. I really enjoy the pretty simply object model, the message passing OO, and blocks. An interesting point that I read somewhere the other day, from someone who codes in a lot of both: Ruby (to him) is kind of ugly, and Python is very pretty. Yet, the exact part…
> Ruby is incredibly flexible, whereas Python is not. Often times my idea of the way things should be done is not Guido's idea, and so Python seems a bit lacking. Apropos: Does Ruby optimize tail calls?
I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
201–210 of 231 posts
Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
#202I'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…
To use python you need to download it first, from http://www.python.org/download/
It'll work from Hong Kong, and probably most places in the world, but if you cross the Chinese border into Shenzhen, you'll get "The connection has been reset". Same with other places in mainland China I've been.
Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 I've known people who could write bad code in Java with the utmost ease! It'd probably be more accurate to say that Java deliberately limits its expressiveness, in order to make it harder for people to shoot themselves in the foot, and to make it easier for one programmer to understand what another has written.
> It'd probably be more accurate to say that Java deliberately limits its expressiveness, in order to make it harder for people to shoot themselves in the foot, and to make it easier for one programmer to understand what another has written.
That is exactly what I meant.
Bad programmers exist. They will write bad code, no matter what language they're made to use.
Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
#204Programming languages all come with a specific mental model for how you're supposed to code in the language. That's why it's so useful to learn different types of languages so that you "pick up" those different ways of thinking. Everybody thinks differently so not every language is going to suit the tastes of every developer. You may find that Lua or Ruby are a better fit with your thinking patterns and that you are more productive using one of those as a scripting language of choice.
The power of scripting languages really come down to a very simple thing: each line of code in a scripting language is equivalent to roughly 5 to 10 lines in a systems programming language. You're doing the same mundane programming tasks but with fewer lines and getting nearly the same performance as if you had written the code in one of the systems languages. It really won't make much difference which one you use, you'll see the same productivity gains using Perl, Ruby, Python, Lua or practically any of the others. However, the more obscure the language you choose, the fewer developers and the fewer available libraries to use.
Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is, I've never met a programmer who doesn't think of indentation. I've never seen a (real) project which doesn't have indentation. So if everyone is doing it anyway, why not take advantage of it and make it a part of the language? This way programmers learn to use indentation from the start (which any real programmer uses anyway), and indentation is always correct, nothing to ever think about.
Shouldn't tools take care of that before a commit to svn, git, etc? Java has formatters, the Go language has one. Do any exist for Python or Perl?
Take care of indentation, you mean?
1. People don't indent consistently. There are a lot of (imo, pointless) arguments about where to place the braces, etc. One of the advantages of the language forcing a style is that arguments about it are no longer necessary.
2. Why should tools be taking care of this? People indent to understand the code better. Everyone agrees that you have to do it. So what's the problem with the language forcing you to do it? I'd rather it be part of the language than an external tool enforcing it.
Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is, I've never met a programmer who doesn't think of indentation. I've never seen a (real) project which doesn't have indentation. So if everyone is doing it anyway, why not take advantage of it and make it a part of the language? This way programmers learn to use indentation from the start (which any real programmer uses anyway), and indentation is always correct, nothing to ever think about.
It makes it harder to correctly do operations on code as text, eg, inserting a chunk of code from elsewhere or moving it out from or under an "if" statement. I have trouble with this occasionally working in emacs at least.
This does get to be a problem with people not indenting consistently. I.e., some code using tabs and some using spaces, and then copying between them.
Technically, your editor should take care of that for you, but some of them don't do it properly (and sometimes can't do it properly), and it really sucks.
Well, everything has a downside :)
Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
#207Python's alright, but it made me work too hard for what it does. I tried hard to like it but using Python for writing scripts I was constantly asking it, "why are you making me do extra work? Perl doesn't make me do half the crap that you ask of me" (ex. regexes, quoting, string interpolating). Also, Perl has the CPAN, so, I fired Python and use Perl.
Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
#208I don't like Python, either. There's nothing wrong with disliking Python - there's lot to dislike. There's also a lot to like, for a certain kind of person - e.g. not you and me.
It's an aesthetic and personal choice.
Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?)
That's what I ended up doing, but this was happening with a very large set, right in an inner loop. Luckily this was running in batch mode, so I could go get lunch or something instead of taking the time to make it faster.
Re: I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why doesn't anyone ever mention my favorite language, Tcl? foreach line [read stdin] { foreach word [split $line] { if [string match *ing $word] { puts $word } } }
One reason is that people haven't looked at Tcl in a while and so they "already know" what Tcl brings to the table. There have been a lot of changes/additions to Tcl in the last couple years alone. It is a very nice and consistent...and to borrow from Ruby...FUN language to program in. The one thing that gets me is the "it's already been done" mentality. If you love Tcl then you want to create things in Tcl for the w…
Yeah .. I have not faced this kind of wall until now but I get your point.
The whole scripting language issue is a complicated one imo.. People want to either use 100% scripting or 100% system (i.e., C), which is not alright. Combine scripting & system according to your needs. This is why I like Tcl the most: It prevents you from using it where there might be computational bottlenecks (e.g., in algorithms). It is meant to complement C, not replace it. Anyway this is a separate thread.