Reasons Python Sucks

Seeing your invitation for critique..

I didn't downvote you, but you present complaints without support or putting forward alternatives other than everyone should ditch Python in favor of Perl. 2 of your 3 complaints come across as shallow syntactic bikeshedding presented without support.

It would be interesting to read your take on the engineering problems involved, the design tradeoffs involved, and why you think Perl's decisions are more appropriate than Python's decisions, even for Python's main use cases.

Python rubbed me the wrong way when I first encountered it, then I really loved it for a few years. Now, I feel it's pretty good at what it does, but I find other languages more interesting.

Maybe you have some good reasoning behind your gripes, but you don't provide any evidence that you've thought much about them or put any effort into understanding the design decisions.

For your first complaint, I do agree that the explicit self parameter vs just making it a keyword is hard to justify in retrospect, but is it really raising your blood pressure, causing you to lose sleep, etc? Your use of hyperbole doesn't help your case.

I presume that making all method calls explicit is to keep scoping sane in the case where a subclass defines a method that happens to accidentally conflict with the name of a function called in some superclass's method. An alternative would be to use static name resolution to resolve the ambiguity, but then you'd have to be statically invoking metaclasses to figure out which methods were in scope, or you'd have to get rid of metaclasses and generally get rid of a bunch of the effort Python goes through to be very late-binding and generally dynamic in behavior.

For your second complaint, if you don't want the dict to throw, use the get method instead of the brackets operator.

For your third complaint, I'm not sure exactly what you're complaining about. Clearly not every line literally ends with a colon, and you're again making poor use of hyperbole. Guido has commented in at least one interview that most of the colon's aren't necessary to disambiguate the grammar, but they really do help beginners in particular read the code.

Showing more effort toward educating and/or convincing people would help avoid the downvotes.

> I regularly find myself wanting to write something of the form do_x() if a.y() This is stupid, but I still kind of want it since do_x() if a.y() else do_y() is valid

cough maybe you should be programming in Ruby ;)

Totally agree. The author needs to read the Python docs.

As far as I can tell, nobody creates new code for PostgreSQL 9, but we drag it along because nobody's ported the needed code to PostgreSQL 11. At the official PostgreSQL web site, their documentation is actively maintained and available for PostgreSQL 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, 10.6, and 11.1 -- because they can't decide to give up on the old code. PostgreSQL is like the zombie of relational databases -- the dead just keep walking on.

> And Python? It uses spaces. If you need to define a scope for complex code, then you indent the next few lines. The scope ends when the indent ends.

Curiously, I never see the indent scope complaint about, say, Haskell. It's always just Python. I've wondered for a long time why that is. There's the obvious one, that Python is just far more popular, but I'd expect experienced people to have used or at least seen another language that does it.