Reasons Python Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#211

Post by sam0x17 » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

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. 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.

Regarding 1: I'm sick of people saying that the ecosystem != the language. No one is going to be able to prop up an alternative ecosystem and get more traction than the language's own ecosystem, so you are basically always stuck with whatever crazy ecosystem comes with the language. Most of what people care about is the ecosystem and the syntactic sugar relationship the ecosystem has with the language, so it is a very real criticism imo if a major programming language has a bad ecosystem.

You are stuck with the ecosystem you ship with the language, so get it right the first time.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#212

Post by laurentl » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

faizshah wrote: post #27

My top 3 criticisms as an intermediate (~5 months of study) python programmer: 1. Importing behavior is ridiculous: https://chrisyeh96.github.io/2017/08/08/definitive-guide-pyt... 2. Python libraries' documentation leave a lot to be desired (compared to good javadocs). Just because your language is dynamically typed doesn't mean you don't need to describe what the expected shape of a parameter should be. 3. Static me…

As a former certified Java programmer, moving to Python was a breath of fresh air. More concise syntax, no more braces all over the place, much less boilerplate (think getter, setter, public static void main(String[] args)) and not everything has to be an object. First-class functions, yay ! (I haven’t used Java seriously since 1.6 so I don’t know how much the language has evolved since then). The only reason I’ve had to go back to Java is specific libraries, and speed.

Python’s philosophy of convention rather than constraint is a nice chance from Java’s corseted mindset. But I’ve never had to use Python in a large development team, so I don’t know how well it holds up with a large group of devs.

As an aside, if you have fun with comprehensions, itertools and lambdas, I urge you to take a look at functional programming!

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#213

Post by phodge » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

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…

> Most programming languages pass function parameters by value

The biggest irony here is that if you wrote your code in C instead, you would actually pass more arguments by reference than in equivalent python, because you're going to use pointers for everything but primitive integer values.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#214

Post by mrfredward » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

Symmetry wrote: post #43

superasn wrote: post #19

I too have tried it many times mainly because of all the great ML libs for python but each time I dreaded using it for Reason #3 (Syntax). Using indents for blocks just seemed unintuitive and error prone to me. But I dismissed it because all the programming languages I've worked with have had curly braces so maybe the reason for my discomfort was that it was unfamiliar.

Most languages that use braces also encourage you to indent the things enclosed by the braces to make it easier to read. However, people sometimes make mistakes. For instance I've seen this quite a number of times if (a) somestatement; someotherstatement; athirdstatement; Which is of course horribly misleading unless you're careful because the second statement isn't actually conditional on a. Python forces the indent…

>Python forces the indent to match the semantics.

It sounds great in theory, but it leads to problems in practice. If you copy and paste code from any language with C style syntax, it's trivial to fix the formatting based on where the braces are, and your editor can help. With python, testing a 10 line example program from a forum post can turn out to be quite difficult. Not to mention, if a tab character ends up anywhere in your program, you now have a syntax error that's completely invisible to the eye. Lastly, it makes it difficult to have clean syntax for multi-line statements.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#215

Post by corydominguez » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

I agree with a lot of these points. To get around them I created https://github.com/c11z/python-mk which is a make file that contains the seed of a python development environment. It uses docker containers to get around most of the issues this article brings up.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#216

Post by sifoobar » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

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…

I'm pretty sure Python's list type is implemented as a dynamic array, otherwise random access wouldn't work very well.

Maybe try to not identify so hard with language choice? That way you gain the capability of processing critique without loosing your marbles.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#217

Post by mixmastamyk » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

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, because dealing with libraries that take complex objects as function parameters can be an absolute nightmare.

Meh, never encountered this in 20 years. Typing is helpful in large projects however, and not just with complex objects.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#218

Post by OJFord » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:34 PM UTC

fernandotakai wrote: post #104

mherrmann wrote: post #92

> My code for Python 3.5 won't work with the Python 3.7 installation unless I intentionally port it to 3.7. This statement is plain wrong at best and intentionally misleading at worst. 99.99% of Python 3.5 code runs unmodified on 3.7. > At the official Python web site, their documentation is actively maintained and available for Python 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7 -- because they can't decide to give up on the old code. No…

afaik the only thing on python 3.7 that is backwards incompatible to 3.5 is: > async and await are now reserved keywords. so unless the author is using async/await as variable names (and i wonder why they would), 3.5 code is going to run as expected.

> unless the author is using async/await as variable names (and i wonder why they would)

Kubernetes-cli did, [0] inadvertently due to code generated by Swagger. [1]

That doesn't mean only that project either - it means anything _depending_ (not necessarily directly!) on it is also broken under 3.7. [2]

[0]: https://github.com/kubernetes-client/python/issues/558

[1]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-codegen/pull/8401

[2]: It bit me.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#219

Post by blattimwind » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:34 PM UTC

sam0x17 wrote: post #211

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. 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. Regarding 1: I'm sick of people saying that the ecosystem != the language. No one is going to…

There actually are separate Python ecosystems (applications embedding Python or relatively detached distributions like Anaconda). Similarly you don't really care about e.g. the larger Lua ecosystem when you are targeting a specific application using Lua. It has its own ecosystem.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#220

Post by sam0x17 » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 6:34 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #183

013a wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ec…

Note how almost all languages you take as shiny examples of virtue post-date Python: they all learnt from it so much , particularly on things like the stdlib. Python’s stdlib was the gold standard for a long, long time (the “batteries included” slogan was effective for a reason - they really were!). This was not by accident - Guido and others have always had the utmost care for good developer experience out of the bo…

This begs the question though why can't the python ecosystem simply evolve? Is that too much to ask? You say these languages have learned so much from Python. If there is so much to learn in terms of do's and dont's, why doesn't Python simply follow this advice?