Reasons Python Sucks

Java primitives (short, float, double, etc...) are copied to the calling function, but arrays and objects are passed by reference. This is easier to explain in a language like C++, which can do either:

    // Java always does these:
    void f(Object& o) { ... } // passes objects by reference
    void g(double x) { ... }  // primitives are copied

    // Java can not do these:
    void p(Object o) { ... }  // copy of the object
    void q(double& x) { ... } // reference to primitive

CPython always passes by reference (pointer), and a C extension can break the rules and modify the otherwise immutable types (int, float, complex, string, etc...).

You can squint and say everything is pass-by-value because you can always pass pointers, but then we're really losing any meaningful definitions for what semantics we're describing. I mean, it's all pass-be-electron if you dive deeply enough.

I'm a python hater. Yes it is easy, but in exactly the wrong way. Easy for simple code for middle schoolers. For grownups with large codebases to develop and maintain, it's not optimal.

Of course I hate the whitespace trickery. I hate the auto formatting that sometimes doesn't work. Those are fairly minor.

What I really, really hate is the lack of static typechecking. You often have to read lengthy swathes of code to understand how functions are actually used. The conventions in the community are terrible. I have used respected libraries where functions are designed to return a variety of types, just because, so you need to dynamically typecheck your results. Gawd.

And just as bad the fact it is impossible to encapsulate code. This underscore nonsense, don't even mention it. Sheesh. I have found that in real life, internals bleed out over the code base making code more fragile over time and harder to refactor. It has all these open source scientific libraries because professional programmers were working on other things, and that is truly unfortunate.

The lack of seriousness is demonstrated by the fact that it's frozen in time in terms of runtime data structures because cpython knows and relies on those internals. Nutso.

And then the GIL!! What the ?@.

No, the biggest irony is that C as a language does not even have a syntax for passing by reference. Everything, including pointers, is passed by value. References were introduced in C++.

This article gets worse with every paragraph:

> My code for Python 3.5 won't work with the Python 3.7 installation unless I intentionally port it to 3.7.

Probably not. While I can't guarantee there are zero breaking changes, it is highly unlikely to encounter any from 3.5 to 3.7. Another numerical pair might have been a better example.

The split between 2/3 was an issue, widely known, and in the past. Personally I'm glad some big problems in 2 were fixed, though there was some pain.

> When Perl5 came out, a lot of people just switched to a different programming language that was more stable.

Nope, Perl 5 was incredibly popular. It was 6 and the two decade wait where folks jumped ship.

> 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.

Nope, it tells you the first line where the indent is wrong.

> imports: then search every file in every directory

Nope, just type import ... If you want to know which file it found, print(module).

....

Others have found the other issues. Most of these are nitpicks from someone who doesn't fully understand or agree with the tradeoffs chosen.

IMHO, the biggest design flaw left in Python is that it is always dynamic and that's what makes it so slow.

Why too dynamic? Well, changing types of variables isn't used much in practice. So, to pay a time cost for it on every single line is unnecessary. If types were fixed by default but let you opt in to dynamic when needed, we'd have the best of both worlds. Speedy most of the time, dynamic and slow when actually useful.

Basically whole infrastructures like Cython have been built to correct this.

I'm not even sure his pronunciation anecdote is true.

Pypy is pronounced pie-pie

PyPI is pronounced Pie Pee-Eye

Isn't it?