Python is such a good get-shit-done language. I've been diving into the Qt bindings at work recently, and I've gotta say, these are hella underrated.
The Incredible Growth of Python
111–120 of 224 posts
Re: The Incredible Growth of Python
#112Re: The Incredible Growth of Python
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Three of us (including me), in an academic lab, are making the jump from matlab to python. We use py3 (of Anaconda, on Windows10). We like it, but we are constantly screaming and bitching about the complications of 2 3 ("Ahhh X and Y module only works on py2!", "Ahhh device developer only provides example code for Labview and Matlab!", "Ahhh python isn't even supported for this device/application!"). Package manageme…
Actually I always complain about Python packaging when I'm only using Python. But the moment I start using it in other languages I dream about the comfort and professionalism of tools in Python. Of course in scientific Py you need compiled C attachments, which makes it more complex. But in normal Py usage you only need pip. Easy Install is only needed when you don't have pip installed. Pip is a drop in replacement wi…
Easy install hasn't been needed for years, consider it deprecated.
Re: The Incredible Growth of Python
#114Three years ago, I was shutting down my startup which was a webapp built in PHP using my own framework. I decided I was going to consult and I also decided it was time to learn a professional, modern framework.
At the time, RoR was hot and I was leaning towards it. Laravel felt good too because it was new and it seemed to do PHP web "right". The last option was Python and Django. What I liked about the latter is that data science seemed (still is?) the lingua franca of data science and I figured I could learn web programming and build up my Python skills that I could one day apply towards data science.
I ultimately went with Python and haven't looked back. Django (particularly DRF - shout out to Tom Christie if he's reading) has been an utter joy to work with. Even though we're in the era of fat front-ends, it's nice to have a bullet-proof, well supported backend.
Python donation page: https://www.python.org/psf/donations/
Django donation page: https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/
Django rest framework donation page: https://fund.django-rest-framework.org/topics/funding/
Re: The Incredible Growth of Python
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python certainly has a lot more software written for it. I use it for scientific computing. For building websites, php has plenty of good options too. I do really like the Silex framework for website construction. I backend process with java or python when needed to do any substantial computations. The "standardization" on common libraries from symfony and zend, have made everything a lot better.
Referencing a micro-framework shows just how out of the loop you are. A better example of a PHP framework is Yii, but you still see tons of ambiguous arrays used because of the lack of expressiveness in the language. Zend is not even a contender for modern web application development. And again, the gratuitous use of arrays for configuration highlight the shortcomings of PHP.
And mentioning Yii here instead of, say, Laravel or Symfony (though I loathe the latter) makes me wonder how in the loop you are, yourself.
I've not been a PHP developer for years. I wouldn't go back to it. But pretending it can't compete with Django is one of the weirder things I've seen on HN in a while.
Re: The Incredible Growth of Python
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Package management was so frustrating coming from Ruby to Python. There are so many programs, and version conflicts that I run into all the time. With gems and bundler, it was rare if things didn't work.
If you get into the habit of making a virtual environment and requirements.txt in every repo then it's smooth. Just activate the env when you're using the repo and use vanilla pip install to install dependencies. Then pip freeze them into the requirements file. It's a very similar workflow to a gemfile and bundler.
You're going to have a hard time supporting multiple versions of Python that way. If I started a new package today I would target 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7-dev, and likely, 2.7. A lot of well maintained packages have different dependencies based on the exact version of Python. If you're crazy enough to support 2.6, then there will be a lot of additional packages in pip freeze.
Ideally, packages would have just one set of dependencies and the packages would be version locked, but that's just not the case in the Python community.
Re: The Incredible Growth of Python
#117Python 2 advocates were quite firm in telling us that Python 3 and its incompatibility with Python 2 had killed Python and people would abandon Python altogether in droves for other languages. This post is suggesting the opposite, that Python is more healthy than ever and growing incredibly fast.
Jan 1 2018 is the day I abandon Python 2 for all greenfield projects.
We did that in 2014 in production already :)
Re: The Incredible Growth of Python
#118Python 2 advocates were quite firm in telling us that Python 3 and its incompatibility with Python 2 had killed Python and people would abandon Python altogether in droves for other languages. This post is suggesting the opposite, that Python is more healthy than ever and growing incredibly fast.
Those people were advocating for stability, not necessarily for P2. The 2->3 was a pretty big screw up, and it definitely had an impact on the language and ecosystem.
Python seems to have overcome that (keyword: seems), thanks to a strong offering in data science, but 2->3 is still a headache. I never really used Python for application development, but rather for utility/scripts and I am still on 2, because I don't need more.
2 is available out of the box on all OSes and at work we also use 2 for building tools.
I have the feeling that Python is still losing people to Golang due to its weak performance and Golang's reputation in that area.
So instead of being arrogant about 2->3, I'd say Python devs should be thankful to data science for saving their butts. :)
Re: The Incredible Growth of Python
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually I always complain about Python packaging when I'm only using Python. But the moment I start using it in other languages I dream about the comfort and professionalism of tools in Python. Of course in scientific Py you need compiled C attachments, which makes it more complex. But in normal Py usage you only need pip. Easy Install is only needed when you don't have pip installed. Pip is a drop in replacement wi…
Easy install hasn't been needed for years, consider it deprecated.
Well, as said before sometimes you need it because pip isn't installed by default.
Just had such a situation yesterday at work. A guy from QA (not a dev) needs to setup an environment to install our tool for testing. He doesn't know python, so explaining to him what a virtualenv is would take way too much time. He probably also doesn't know how to use the OS's package manager to install pip. So, what to do? Give him the oneliner "$ sudo easy_install whatever". It works, he doesn't need to understand it, and actual system maintenance doesn't matter because it's just a VM that gets deleted after he's done anyways.
Re: The Incredible Growth of Python
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Pip should be pretty straight forward. Maybe you use different libraries than I do.
But be sure to use Pip into this year's flavor of virtual environments rather than globally, since you might have multiple projects that need different versions of the same package. And be sure to run the right version, I've seen situations where a computer had python 2 and 3 installed, somehow python3 became the default when running "python" but if you ran "pip" you'd get dumped into the old version. And if your edi…
Honestly, virtualenv works. Every single time. I use virtualenvwrapper because I find it and the aliases it provides useful.
I'll stop using virutalenv when it actually becomes a hindrance. I know venv exists, but I have precisely zero incentive to use it when virtualenv works and allows me to get on with what I actually want to do.