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Reasons Python Sucks

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Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#501

Post by RhodesianHunter »

toyg wrote: post #431
da_chicken wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note how almost all languages you take as shiny examples of virtue post-date Python That's because Python is old . It's as old as Haskell. It's older than Java and JavaScript. It's older than the Borland Delphi and C++Builder IDEs. When Python was released, C++ was only 5 years old. Python is older than Linux. Rust and Go are both older than C++ was when Python was released. Hell, when Python was released, Perl was…

> Python's age doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't criticize it. I don't disagree, but for people paying attention, it's become really boring. "I've just switched from $language to Python [because work told me to], and this is what I hate" is almost a parody, at this point. It's a sign the ecosystem has reached ungodly proportions. > If virtualenv or conda are such good solutions, why do so few projects seem to u…

I'm not sure where you get the idea that the Java ecosystem is shrinking when every quantifiable measure (stack overflow polls and data releases, GitHub data) point in the other direction.

Further, if you factor in the growth of languages like Kotlin and Scala the JVM is blowing Python out of the water.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#502

Post by goostavos »

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…

> fuck this whole "it's so cool to shit on Java" thing. Grow up.

Hey! Let people not like things, guy!

I put my pants on, go to work, pick up my heavy JVM, and crack away in the Java mines for 8 hours.

When I finally get home, tired, broken, achy fingered, and filled with disappointment for only making it to the AbstractAbstractFactory, rather than the AbstractFactoryFactory, I think I've earned a few "Yeah, with other type systems you'd be able to..." style complaints.

Greener pastures and whatnot.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#505

Post by pmoriarty »

joshuamorton wrote: post #477
cutety wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python was my first programming language, and though I don’t personally reach for it anymore (at least very rarely), it’s package management is the one large reason I don’t want to use it. All the other complaints I see about the language I don’t give much merit to, people like to complain, every language has it’s quirks and some people just can’t look past them. But, while not a solved problem, there are tons of gre…

Pipenv and poetry both provide lock files. Both handle virtualenvs and version resolution.

"Pipenv: promises a lot, delivers very little":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18612590

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#506

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#507

Post by ubernostrum »

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.

There is one other thing that could break, but it would be a weird one. Which is hard to explain in prose, so here's some example code:

    class SomeMetaClass:
        def __new__(name, bases, attrs):
            pass

    class SomeClass(metaclass=SomeMetaClass):
        pass
Now suppose that SomeClass needs to use the typing module's mechanism for indicating a generic, so you could do an annotation like "SomeClass[SomeOtherType]". So you'd want to have SomeClass be a subclass of, typing.Generic[T]. That would, in Python 3 prior to 3.7, raise a TypeError due to metaclass conflict -- the generics in the typing module had their own base metaclasses. So you actually had to define an intermediate class to resolve the metaclass conflict, and do like so:

    class IntermediateMeta(SomeMetaClass, typing.GenericMeta):
        pass

    class SomeClass(metaclass=IntermediateMeta):
        pass
(this was weird and rare and GenericMeta was never documented)

Python 3.7 implemented PEP 560, which introduced the __class_getitem__ hook for implementing the behavior GenericMeta used to handle, and doing away with the need for the typing generics to use GenericMeta as their metaclass. So GenericMeta exists in Python 3.5 and 3.6, but no longer exists in Python 3.7, and anything which tries to reference it will break.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#508

Post by 013a »

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…

I feel very strongly about never accepting the age old excuse "they were killed by their success, have pity on them." All that's really saying is that they didn't know how to manage the success, which is simply a leadership failure.

And no one could possibly argue that Python hasn't had irregularly poor leadership for a long while. I'd go so far as to say that its success is in spite of its leadership, culminating with Guido basically giving the middle finger and walking away this year. Can't say I blame him.

It is the nature of newer languages to learn from the mistakes of past ones. But the big irregularity which wasn't learned is that these languages I listed have very strong leadership. In the case of Go, I'd argue the strongest leadership of any language ever made, often to the disappointment of the community.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#509

Post by yellowapple »

I also rather strongly dislike Python (which tends to be a problem given that my employer's engineering team uses Python for everything, whereas I very much prefer to use the right tool for the job - which might be Python sometimes, but not often, let alone always). Whitespace-sensitive languages are - in my opinion - not at all user friendly, and the quirks around passing variables by object reference (like how you should never do "def foo(bar=[])" unless you want bar to equal [1,2,3] when you call foo() after having previously called foo([1,2,3])) make JavaScript look somewhat sane.

I will say, though, that I don't mind Python calling things lists and dicts. Those are indeed common terms (both are used in Erlang/Elixir), and reflect the fact that there are multiple possible implementations (lists might be arrays, linked, double-linked, etc., and dicts might be hash tables, keyword lists, etc.).

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#510

Post by AlphaSite »

zbentley wrote: post #483
trashcan wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with `pip install -r requirements.txt` that works out of the box? Works out of the box until you're missing a distro package that is required to build a dependency that needs to be compiled from source. I've never used maven so I don't know if it is better or worse, but I am not a fan of languages having their own package management system that has not integration with the distro one (which probably also offers som…

> I've never used maven so I don't know if it is better or worse It's about the same for packages with a native component. Local build tools are still needed. Java stuff is slightly less likely to have a compiled component in the first place, in my entirely subjective impression. Maybe that's because of convention, or performance; I don't know. But when a compiled dependency does exist, and nobody included a prebuilt…

I’ve always found thinks like LWJGL tricker than pyglet etc.
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