Dude wants a compiler and wants to go fast. And he picks rust? Guys been hanging out way too long on hackernews.
On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
61–70 of 346 posts
Re: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
#62Strongly agree with author. I really like Python and at one point thought that it makes sense to write almost any project in it, since it's so versatile and I know it pretty well. After working on a quite large application and having to use lots of assert(isinstance(arg, type) at the beginning of almost every function, I began to think that a strong type system is very much needed for large projects. I believe this w…
> I began to think that a strong type system You’re confusing static/dynamic and strong/weak. Python is a strongly typed language, but also is dynamicly typed language. Need proof? Try doing this: a = 3 b = “3” c = a + b > having to use lots of assert(isinstance(arg, type)) Python has type hinting now, try using a current version of Python and this isn’t needed.
strong type system != strongly typed.
Type hinting does not guarantee to catch everything, but for Python proponents 95% is apparently "good enough".
Re: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
#63The strengths of Go become apparent when working in teams and when deploying, not when reading blogs about the language before trying to write code in it.
I’m working in a team of 5 people who has never used go prior to 9 months ago and had no training in it and we’ve just been unbelievably productive in it. We came to it from a combination of python and javascript backgrounds and have no problems collaborating or jumping into each other’s code. To me the main advantage of it is that the small number of primitives and simple syntax forces people to in general be very e…
> To me the main advantage of it is that the small number of primitives and simple syntax forces people to in general be very explicit about what you’re doing. The code almost doesn’t need comments.
That has little to do with 'simple syntax', and more with the language itself (and/or its community) setting clear standards as to what "idiomatic" code in the language should look like. And Rust is fairly good at that, albeit with the inherent limitation of having to support the additional complexity of ownership/lifetime management. (Go can do without this since it uses GC instead. Swift just uses ARC everywhere.)
Re: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
#64Dude wants a compiler and wants to go fast. And he picks rust? Guys been hanging out way too long on hackernews.
Could not have put it better myself. If he wants fast, short of hand writing in assembler, CUDA Fortran is the way to go. Too much exposure to "Hacker" "News".
Re: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
#65After all python is still an interpreted scripting language. To me comparing it to rust and go is like apples and oranges.
At a high level, I agree with what you're saying here - that it's difficult to compare rust or go with python. But I take some issue with your reasoning. > After all python is still an interpreted scripting language. Is it? Or rather, is this even a well-defined category? > interpreted Can't any (OK, almost any) language be either interpreted or compiled? The fact that python is typically run in an interpretive runti…
> Is it? Or rather, is [Scripting Languages] even a well-defined category?
We could say that the typical compiled language is used for scripting Unix syscalls :-)
Re: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps there should be apostasy punishments for Python defectors. /s Python's typing story is far from perfect and rather annoying compared to other languages. Python is good for interacting with the operating system, networking and other things. But wanting a proper compiler is an honest motivation.
Yet the entire data science world is built on Python. I don't understand this blatant disregard of reality.
Wrong: the data science world is built on R, which was designed from the ground up to be the freeware alternative to SAS and Mathematica.
Re: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
#67> Rust is developed by a community, and was started by Mozilla. Go development seems to be de facto controlled by Google, who originated the language. I'd rather bet my non-work future on a language that isn't controlled by a huge corporation, especially one of the main players in today's surveillance economy. Anyone else agree with this view ? Programming languages should be choosen based on technical merits, rather…
The original author comes close to contradicting themselves - Python too is developed by a community, but one of the reasons for moving away is that they are "not getting the feeling that the Python community is going in a direction I want to follow". That can happen to communities just as well as it can to corporations.
Re: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps there should be apostasy punishments for Python defectors. /s Python's typing story is far from perfect and rather annoying compared to other languages. Python is good for interacting with the operating system, networking and other things. But wanting a proper compiler is an honest motivation.
Yet the entire data science world is built on Python. I don't understand this blatant disregard of reality.
no, the trivial frontend is built in python; the real code is usually c++ or c.
Ignore that reality if you want to, but it is a fact.
Big complicated python projects are seldom pure python, they are usually a friendly python frontend to a serious application written in something else.
It seems in no way remarkable that someone wanting to build a serious backend type piece of functionality would pick another language that was, just for example, multithreaded.
Re: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps there should be apostasy punishments for Python defectors. /s Python's typing story is far from perfect and rather annoying compared to other languages. Python is good for interacting with the operating system, networking and other things. But wanting a proper compiler is an honest motivation.
Yet the entire data science world is built on Python. I don't understand this blatant disregard of reality.
Not just data science: the entire machine learning and scientific computing world, if we’re honest. Need to do huge numerical linear algebra operations very fast with great memory safety and ease of use? Python.
Re: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python
#70> Note that I've not written any significant code in either language, so I'm just writing based on what I've learnt by reading. So he’s basically comparing 20+ years of Python usage with marketing material from Go and Rust. Right. I wish people could be honest with their motivations, instead of making up excuses to justify this sort of change. Here it’s a classic case of “I got bored and I don’t like the new features…
> Here it’s a classic case of “I got bored and I don’t like the new features, want new shiny”, wrapped in a bit of whining This seems to be a rather shallow reading of the blogpost, and the way you phrased your reaction is not exactly polite either. If anything, the "adoption rates" of Python (like those of ECMAscript, a language of a similar vintage all-things-considered) are most easily explained by non-technical f…
There was absolutely nothing impolite in the way he phrased his response. Rather, what I'm responding to is passive-aggressive.