No.
This. Swift is the language of the future.
Is Python the Future of Programming?
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Is Python the Future of Programming?
#52I'm not sure. I see so much money being poured into making scripting languages faster [0], and with the "End of Moores Law" in sight I feel like the industry is going to be leaning towards static languages [1]. Perhaps developments in gradual typing will allow for the benefits of quick and experimental development (scripting) that can later be calcified into a sturdy fully-typed program with higher performance (throu…
AOT compilation doesn't really solve the problem. You also need to get closer to the metal with the language, data types, algorithms, only then you can get significant performance increase. But this only postpones the problem, hardware is still capped by the end of Moore's law and will push you into concurrency and distributed systems sooner or later. And which language does it better will be an important factor.
Re: Is Python the Future of Programming?
#53Python is one of the simplest language you can learn. It is really nicely designed and executed. If simplicity is the goal, Python has that in spades.
Lua is far simpler, and still easy to learn. Yet it's powerful enough to be used in "real" projects (e.g. Photoshop Lightroom).
Lua comes in quite high on the "Most Dreaded" list of programming languages and has 1-based indices in a world of 0-basing.
Not exactly something I would recommend ...
Re: Is Python the Future of Programming?
#54Python is stupidly simple and that's the reason I use it for 99% of my work (netsec/forensics). I introduced my ex to it for her dissertation in astro-physics. It took her under a week to mainly self-learn and start writing scripts with numpy and matplotlib, and it was her first language. The code wasn't good by professional standards, but it did the job. I cannot think of any programming/scripting language which can…
NO, Python is not simple at all, especially nowadays with all the asyncio stuff and tons of new features in 3.4+. One can't even follow what's happening with the language. I don't understand where this nonsense is coming from. Probably ignorance? You might not know too much about it to understand how huge and complex Python is.
It depends.
I can have an intern up and programming basic Python in about 3 days from nothing. I have run this experiment multiple times with teenagers.
The nice part about Python is that I can gradually introduce them to new features as they hit the problems the features are meant to solve.
And, I WILL argue that Python's syntax is easier to keep in your brain. Somewhere on HN there was an article showing the grammars of various programming languages as connected graphs, Python was quite obviously simpler than just about everything else.
Re: Is Python the Future of Programming?
#55I'm surprised to see this bit: « I certainly didn't set out to create a language that was intended for mass consumption » [Guido van Rossum] explains. As early as 1999 he was one of the authors of the "Computer Programming for Everybody" DARPA funding proposal, which was supposed to be based on Python. See https://www.python.org/doc/essays/everybody/ .
1999 would be a decade after van Rossum started working on Python.
Re: Is Python the Future of Programming?
#56Python does have two growth vectors going for it right now: 1) Deep learning / data science works really well in Python 2) Lambda functions are really great in Python... maybe people will choose to write servers out of Lambda functions instead of writing high performance servers in Go - who knows? Those are big areas, but still a small percentage of all programming work falls into those two categories.
Sorry, but you don't have no clue what you're talking about. Python is an imperative language by nature, and lamdba is very uncomfortable to use for anything than a simple expression. You can use functional elements up to a certain degree, but it will be a pain if you try to force it to be a functional language; you simply can't go very far with it.
I think he means AWS lambda functions, which are super easy in python
Re: Is Python the Future of Programming?
#57Python is stupidly simple and that's the reason I use it for 99% of my work (netsec/forensics). I introduced my ex to it for her dissertation in astro-physics. It took her under a week to mainly self-learn and start writing scripts with numpy and matplotlib, and it was her first language. The code wasn't good by professional standards, but it did the job. I cannot think of any programming/scripting language which can…
NO, Python is not simple at all, especially nowadays with all the asyncio stuff and tons of new features in 3.4+. One can't even follow what's happening with the language. I don't understand where this nonsense is coming from. Probably ignorance? You might not know too much about it to understand how huge and complex Python is.
I agree Python isn't simple at all, but I think it does have a kind of surface simplicity that its culture reinforces. 'one obvious way', etc.
Or to put it another way its a language you can do a lot with without caring too much about details.
Or to put it another way still you can go a long way with Python, Stack Overflow, and a bit of copy and paste.
Re: Is Python the Future of Programming?
#58Python does have two growth vectors going for it right now: 1) Deep learning / data science works really well in Python 2) Lambda functions are really great in Python... maybe people will choose to write servers out of Lambda functions instead of writing high performance servers in Go - who knows? Those are big areas, but still a small percentage of all programming work falls into those two categories.
> Lambda functions are really great in Python Hah, if you had told anyone that five years ago they would have been very confused. "What are you talking about? Lambdas in Python are horribly neutered..." Back to what you actually meant, I think that lambda functions will get simpler to use in every language, and I think JS will extend a lead there even though I prefer Python as a language. I should get my "microservic…
hey yeah I meant AWS lambda functions! I think they are better suited for serverless than JS because JS is so asynchronous, hard to debug, and really designed for an event loop that lasts forever. I tried doing AWS lambda with JS but I found it much less intuitive than Python for AWS lambda, in the same way NodeJS is more intuitive for writing servers with lots of async logic than Python.
Re: Is Python the Future of Programming?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must be stuck in the past. What's great about lambda functions in Python?
I think the parent isn't talking about lambda functions, but about python code deployed on the AWS Lambda
They support many languages, and you have to pay more for slower ones
Re: Is Python the Future of Programming?
#60How are people writing large programs in Python? Isn’t the lack of compiler type checking making it difficult? And what about lack of access modifiers? People aren’t bothered by this? For programs less than 500 lines, I have no issues with Python, but it feels to me like Python just isn’t suited for large-scale programming in the way C#, Java, Go, or Rust are.
> How are people writing large programs in Python? Isn’t the lack of compiler type checking making it difficult?
Python 2 and 3 both have AOT static type checkers available (this is essentially “pre-compile-time”). Presumably those for whom not having this would be a problem use it.
> And what about lack of access modifiers?
It's an issue, but use of the conventional underscore prefix makes mitigation via code review fairly simple.