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Reasons Python Sucks

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Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#111

Post by pdonis »

notacoward wrote: post #70

Most of the points in this article fall on a continuum between irrelevant to dead wrong. 1 (versions) and 2 (installation) have to do with the ecosystem, not the language. Unsigned packages are a real problem, but hating on community-maintained software is just weird. Most software in your local Linux distro's repository is maintained by a "community" that might just be one person working in their spare time. 3 (synt…

With regard to "pass by reference", it's not even clear to me that that's a correct way to describe how Python passes variables to functions. Python variables aren't names for storage locations to begin with; they're namespace bindings. Passing a variable to a function means passing a particular namespace binding from the caller's namespace to the function's local namespace. I don't think the author of this article understands any of that.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#112

Post by Hello71 »

lmm wrote: post #74
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #67

>By the same means, Python has distinct silos of code for each version. And the community keeps dragging along the old versions. So you end up with a lot of old, dead Python code that keeps getting dragged along because nobody wants to spend the time porting it to the latest version. As far as I can tell, nobody creates new code for Python2, but we drag it along because nobody's ported the needed code to Python3.x. A…

> Does this author think a minor version update should immediately EOL the previous version (3.5,3.6)? More likely the author thinks minor version updates should be backward compatible, like they are in virtually every other language? In most languages you'd be able to uninstall 3.5 when you installed 3.6, because you'd be confident that all your 3.5 code would keep working in 3.6.

Except... they mostly are? As far as I can tell, Debian only ships one Python per major version per release, Fedora does the same, Arch does the same. Gentoo lets you install everything side-by-side, but it does the same thing for gcc, binutils, ruby, wine, llvm, and dozens of other packages, and I don't see the author complaining about those.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#113

Post by colanderman »

rciorba wrote: post #64
colanderman wrote: post #35

A better reason to hate Python: the internal model is way overcomplicated for what it's meant to be: a beginner-friendly scripting language. "Everything-is-an-object", duck typing, decorators, bizarre scoping rules, etc., all make it difficult for experienced programmers to understand, let along beginners. I've always thought there's a much simpler language struggling to get out of Python, and I wish it would and wou…

> Take lists: some operations are methods, some are functions, some mutate the list, some make a copy, some are global, some are in a module. Let's take the list type, the public methods are: 'clear', 'copy', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove', 'reverse', 'sort' Obviously as the names imply `copy` returns a new list, and `count` returns an integer. Neither mutate the list. For the rest of it: metho…

OK, fair point. I misremembered the list interface.

`set` is a better example: `set.union`, for example, returns a new set, while `set.add` updates in place. (To be fair, this is with Python 2.7, maybe Python 3+ is more uniform?)

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#114

Post by fhood »

Hello71 wrote: post #101
notacoward wrote: post #70

Most of the points in this article fall on a continuum between irrelevant to dead wrong. 1 (versions) and 2 (installation) have to do with the ecosystem, not the language. Unsigned packages are a real problem, but hating on community-maintained software is just weird. Most software in your local Linux distro's repository is maintained by a "community" that might just be one person working in their spare time. 3 (synt…

> And I pity anyone who miscounts spaces and accidentally puts in three spaces instead of four somewhere -- this can take hours to debug and track down. this is so hilariously wrong that it is clear that the author has never actually tried any of the things he complains about. Python 3.7.1 (default, Oct 22 2018, 10:41:28) [GCC 8.2.1 20180831] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more informat…

Not to mention, who hits the spacebar four times for their indentation? Actually. Do people do that?

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#115

Post by brudgers »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #3

A number of these points seem like reasonable opinions to have. But two which had me questioning the breadth of the author's experience were "Most programming languages pass function parameters by value." and "In every other language, arrays are called 'arrays'. In Python, they are called 'lists'." To the author: 1. Java, JavaScript and C# all have types which are passed by reference. (They also have types which are…

What Java, JavaScript and C# call "arrays" are each very much like what Python calls "lists'. In particular the indexing after push() and pop() type operations and the bigO of indexing.

More abstractly, Historically, in computing "list" connotes pointers and "array" connotes sequential memory. The connotations imply engineering tradeoffs. [1] "List" may make more sense for a beginning programmer. It is an arbitrary context switch for programmers writing in multiple languages. Considering that one of the driving use cases of Python has been systems programming, "list" is misleading regarding performance characteristics. [2]

[1]: For example as in Scala https://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/collections/performanc...

[2]: googling "python arrays" returns a lot of results explaining the difference between Python's Arrays and Python's Lists. "List" is "foo => spam" and "bar => eggs" Pythonism gone too far.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#116

Post by closed »

fhood wrote: post #100
notacoward wrote: post #70

Most of the points in this article fall on a continuum between irrelevant to dead wrong. 1 (versions) and 2 (installation) have to do with the ecosystem, not the language. Unsigned packages are a real problem, but hating on community-maintained software is just weird. Most software in your local Linux distro's repository is maintained by a "community" that might just be one person working in their spare time. 3 (synt…

It's funny how far off the author was, because there are genuine things to complain about with python, though they may not be exclusive to python. I regularly wish python required some sort type indication for function parameters, because dealing with libraries that take complex objects as function parameters can be an absolute nightmare. I wish python had some equivalent to the switch statement that didn't involve w…

> I regularly wish python required some sort type indication for function parameters

You can use type annotations, either via the builtin lib or 3rd party libs!

https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html

> do_x() if a.y()

I feel this. You can use `a.y() and do_x()`, but I'm not sure how people would react :o

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#117

Post by pdonis »

colanderman wrote: post #11
CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #3

A number of these points seem like reasonable opinions to have. But two which had me questioning the breadth of the author's experience were "Most programming languages pass function parameters by value." and "In every other language, arrays are called 'arrays'. In Python, they are called 'lists'." To the author: 1. Java, JavaScript and C# all have types which are passed by reference. (They also have types which are…

Python (and Java) do not pass anything by reference. They pass by pointer-value. (If they passed by reference, you could change to which value a caller's variable was bound, like you can in C++).

> They pass by pointer-value.

No, Python doesn't even do that, because Python variables aren't names for storage locations to begin with. They're namespace bindings. Passing a variable to a Python function means transferring a namespace binding from the caller's namespace to the function's local namespace.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#118

Post by fhood »

closed wrote: post #116
fhood wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how far off the author was, because there are genuine things to complain about with python, though they may not be exclusive to python. I regularly wish python required some sort type indication for function parameters, because dealing with libraries that take complex objects as function parameters can be an absolute nightmare. I wish python had some equivalent to the switch statement that didn't involve w…

> I regularly wish python required some sort type indication for function parameters You can use type annotations, either via the builtin lib or 3rd party libs! https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html > do_x() if a.y() I feel this. You can use `a.y() and do_x()`, but I'm not sure how people would react :o

> You can use type annotations, either via the builtin lib or 3rd party libs!

> https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html

I know, but tragically, because I am not forced to, I never do. I do appreciate that feature though. Maybe this will be the impetus I need to start taking advantage of it.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#119

Post by 013a »

notacoward wrote: post #70

Most of the points in this article fall on a continuum between irrelevant to dead wrong. 1 (versions) and 2 (installation) have to do with the ecosystem, not the language. Unsigned packages are a real problem, but hating on community-maintained software is just weird. Most software in your local Linux distro's repository is maintained by a "community" that might just be one person working in their spare time. 3 (synt…

> 1 (versions) and 2 (installation) have to do with the ecosystem, not the language.

This argument really summarizes a beautiful and dangerous thing we see in the tech community far too often; you have a strong technical and scientific understanding of the system, but lack product and design thinking.

You're right. Its a problem with the ecosystem, not the language. I'm still not going to use python because of the ecosystem. If the language cares about its users, it needs to care about the Product, which includes the ecosystem. Users interact with the Product, not just the Language.

That's something recent languages like Go, Typescript, Rust, and even old languages like Java, understood quite well. Its not just about the syntax and the compiler; getting users into your language means caring about the IDE, caring about the development experience, the package management, the libraries, basically everything that a developer will touch. That doesn't mean you have to touch all that stuff as the core development team, but it does mean you need a Strategy and a Message.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#120

Post by pkolaczk »

notacoward wrote: post #70

Most of the points in this article fall on a continuum between irrelevant to dead wrong. 1 (versions) and 2 (installation) have to do with the ecosystem, not the language. Unsigned packages are a real problem, but hating on community-maintained software is just weird. Most software in your local Linux distro's repository is maintained by a "community" that might just be one person working in their spare time. 3 (synt…

7 Isn't Python actually pass-by-value / pass-pointer-to-object-by-value like Java is? Many confuse pass-pointer-to-object-by-value with pass-by-reference, but they are different things. Pass-by-reference allows to write a procedure that swaps two external values.
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