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Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

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Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#51

Post by pjmlp »

joshuamorton wrote: post #34
diebir wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, the package management in Python sucks so bad it's not funny. This alone is a reason enough for me to never touch Python again.

Yes but "sucking so bad its not even funny" is still superior to maven and ant (and as another user mentioned, pipenv is a very good approximation of Cargo, which is a really good build and package management system).

I would take Maven and Ant any day over having to play with virtual environments, multiple Python installations and Python 2/3 dictonomy.

Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#52

Post by davesque »

trendia wrote: post #6

> "Python has been used by hundreds of happy users" Hundreds! > "Please don't ask me to mail it to you -- at 1.76 Megabytes it is unwieldy at least..." I can not even figure out if this means email or snail mail.

You're probably joking but, just for kicks and to provide some historical context, my guess is email. I seem to recall that attachment sizes would have been limited to something less than that back then. Also, 1.76 MB could have fit onto two HD floppies which would have made it easy to snail mail. Although it wouldn't have been all that hard to download with a 14.4 modem.

Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#53

Post by kumarvvr »

willtim wrote: post #49
kumarvvr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the info. Just curious, what sort of problems are strongly typed languages most suited for? In the sense that which class of problems can be solved using them leading to elegant solutions.

I use Haskell professionally in the area of quantitative finance in a large team with a multi-million line codebase. Everything is built upon domain specific libraries, sometimes many layers deep. And these libraries are constantly changing to keep pace with the business. Strong types tell us early when things are broken. Others are attempting to use Python for similar projects, but it isn't fun (we have some of thei…

So, highly reliable and completely transparent data processing. Awesome. Very interesting to know. I always assumed financial data processing, HFT, etc are done in java / C# or other mainstream languages.

And yes, in such a situation, Python will not be an easy fit.

Thanks a lot for sharing the info. Have been wanting to learn functional programming for a long time now. Specifically, I am planning to build computation systems based on Haskell, Scala, etc which sit behind a Message Queue server. Just to isolate the computation part from other mundane activities like HTTP request processing.

Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#54

Post by microtonal »

kalefranz wrote: post #46
microtonal wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, that would be Java, which was introduced in 1995. For whatever hey are worth, most language popularity indexes (TIOBE, LangPop) place Java above Python with quite a large margin. Java may not get much exposure here or in startups, but if you go out in the real world of 'boring' business applications, Java is pretty much the defacto language (together with C#).

According to [this]( https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/06/incredible-growth-pyth... ) Stack Overflow study: "Python stands alone as a tag that is both large and growing rapidly; the next-largest tag that shows similar growth is R."

I would really be careful to use StackOverflow statistics as a proxy of language popularity. There are many ways that Python's relative popularity compared to Java on StackOverflow can be explained. For example: Python is used more by hobbyist programmers, hence more questions about it. Or: Java is taught in many universities, so people generally have fewer questions about Java.

If you go outside this filter bubble and look at the large IT companies, such as IBM, Oracle, Accenture, Atos, Capgemini, SAP, etc. they are all JVM/.NET shops. Also, on job sites such as Indeed, there are more Java jobs than Python jobs (currently respectively ~60,000 vs. 47,000 in the US) [1].

Note, I am not denying that Python is popular. Python is immensely popular. And I definitely like the Python ecosystem more than the Java ecosystem. I was just contending that the original statement that Python is the most successful language in the last 20 years is concorrect. Java is younger and is (still) more widely used in companies. Of course, Python may or may not surpass Java some day.

[1] Also, the positions mentioning Java often require that an applicant knows Java, whereas ads with Python often have wording such as "dynamic languages such as Javascript, Ruby, Python, and Perl are preferred".

Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#55

Post by tome »

kumarvvr wrote: post #42
willtim wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's "Real World OCaml" (new) and "Real World Haskell" (a bit out of date). But my favourite introductory text, which is not free, is Graham Hutton's "Programming in Haskell".

Thanks for the info. Just curious, what sort of problems are strongly typed languages most suited for? In the sense that which class of problems can be solved using them leading to elegant solutions.

> what sort of problems are strongly typed languages most suited for

I'm going to volunteer an answert to a slightly different question. "What sort of problems are strongly typed languages suited for?". They are suited for general purpose programming.

Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#56

Post by davesque »

dis-sys wrote: post #35

Python 1.0 is great because back then you don't need to worry about the Python2/3 issue. :)

Is it still an issue really? :/

Have been using Python 3 exclusively in production since about a year ago and it really seems like the whole 2/3 thing is starting to blow over.

I haven't found any packages I need that aren't 3 compatible and porting to 3 was really way easier than people had made it out to be.

Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#57

Post by developer2 »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #9

Interesting to read his description of the language, which sounds pretty much exactly like python is now. It’s a pretty good testament to why python gained and retained popularity. Though not without fault, python is certainly one of the best-designed languages ever created, in my opinion.

There's a lot I like about Python, but there are a couple of things that they've gotten so horribly wrong.

1. The KeyboardInterrupt exception for SIGINT. Whoever came up with that idea destroyed the credibility of the entire interpreter. Python falls flat on its face to me because of this one design choice. It's impossible to write a Python script that will not dump a full debug stack trace if you send SIGINT (ie: Ctrl+C) before the first line of your script is reached. That is, even if your very first line of code is a try/except block intended to catch KeyboardInterrupt, a SIGINT early on will still fail spectacularly at some point during Python's internal startup. Python runs a lot of code before turning control over to your script and it's simply not possible to, from within Python, catch these signals.

In order to provide a professional piece of software to clients that will not dump debugging gibberish to the terminal, one must wrap every single Python script with a shell script or small C binary that catches signals and proxies/rewrites SIGINT as SIGTERM, in order to avoid KeyboardInterrupt entirely. Something as fundamental as signal handling having been botched to this extent is frustrating.

2. The asyncio module. They screwed up the async implementation in the earlier phases, and the hacks that have been implemented in an attempt to improve the situation are grotesque. The state of async in Python is confusing enough as it is, but if you happen to run into one of the edge cases where the ways in which they've hacked the core of the language to make room for the async stuff affects you, you're in for quite the ride.

Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#58

Post by ageofwant »

pjmlp wrote: post #40
ageofwant wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure about that. Most company repos are private though, like the one I work for.

I am yet to work for any customer that cares about git for example, so not even private repos. So far my use of git has been on personal projects.

My anecdata is exactly the opposite: I have worked for four companies in the last 12 years, 2 big multinationals, mining and defence. All four used git.

Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#59

Post by yen223 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #42
willtim wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's "Real World OCaml" (new) and "Real World Haskell" (a bit out of date). But my favourite introductory text, which is not free, is Graham Hutton's "Programming in Haskell".

Thanks for the info. Just curious, what sort of problems are strongly typed languages most suited for? In the sense that which class of problems can be solved using them leading to elegant solutions.

There's a famous quote by Linus Torvalds: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

Even when prototyping, I find that nailing down the data structures from the get-go makes subsequent code-writing much easier. A lot of times, the code kind of falls out naturally when you've figured out the data structures you're working with.

Strongly-typed languages give you a nice way to define data structures.

Re: Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)

#60

Post by yen223 »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
kumarvvr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why Python can't replace Java in almost all domains. It's exceptionally well structured and fast enough for most use cases.

Maybe one day, when CPython guys start taking JIT seriously and finally get rid of GIL.

The fact that almost everything in Python is mutable by default pretty much guarantees the GIL is never going away.
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