101–110 of 150 posts
Was there ever a DOS binary? That would be worth firing up a VM for.
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.
And you can do composition easily, that's the main seller for me.
> "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.
That's why when Google released GMail with 1GB of storage in 2004 ( https://slashdot.org/story/04/04/01/0038200/googles-gmail-to... ) it really blew everybody's mind.
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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: Ct…
As a minor nitpick it bugs me a lot that there are no truly anonymous functions. You either have to use a lambda which is limited to expressions, or name a function and use it as a first class object. Every other language in the same domain has this feature.
While they are not true anonymous functions, I have yet to stumble on a scenario where a context manager did not fit the bill. They're easy to create - nothing more than a try/except/finally with a "yield" call to execute... you guessed it, essentially an anonymous function block. It's a little mind-warping the first time through, but it winds up creating clean code. PEP 343 is a good source to learn more.
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Fortune 500 companies. Quality is debatable.
> Quality is debatable. Using a VCS is not though. And sure, you didn't say they didn't, but using SVN or CVS in 2017 isn't good (outside of a very few select situations/industries). Don't be proud of working for large, slow moving companies with poor tech choices. They don't use git yet but they will.
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Ridiculous is suggesting Python is capable of replacing Java in what concerns performance. Specially when it needs extensions written in C or C++ for anything that requires it.
Ridiculous is thinking you could write a whole OS userspace in Java. Ridiculous is making that comment without realising Python is a core part of most modern *nix userspace. try uninstalling Python on a default Ubuntu/Fedora/Centos install and see what still works. I would suggest trying the same with Java, but nobody bundles that by default despite it's JIT. Ridiculous is pontificating about how useless Python is wi…
Let us know when there is an OS with Python userspace that can compare to any of them.
Of course Python is a core component of any UNIX system, it is a perfectly good fit as scripting language.
As a replacement for complex shell scripts, libraries written in C and C++, or scripting GUI applications.
The most successful language in the last twenty years.
I like Python, but as an Android developer, well Java is still the obvious choice for me.
> "If you have a WWW viewer ..." Just curious, had the term "browser" not caught on by then?
The WWW? Isn't that just a WWW viewer? :)
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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#).
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.
:D