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Python Is Eating the World

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#571

Post by ken »

Ensorceled wrote: post #436

Holy Crap! What a lot of irrational, hyperbolic hate for Python. I think everybody should spend their first couple of years working in Fortran IV on IBM TSO/ISPF. No dependency management because you had to write everything yourself. Or maybe [edit: early 90's] C or C++ development where dependency management meant getting packages off a Usenet archive, uudecoding and compiling them yourself after tweaking the config…

I had to learn Fortran IV for my first job. Am I allowed to hate Python?

Are you assuming everyone complaining here is young, and this is their first language? Consider that maybe they're complaining because they've used older languages they liked more.

Often, not having a feature is preferable to having a feature designed or implemented poorly.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#572

Post by TurboHaskal »

peteretep wrote: post #323
hyperion2010 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am about to hit a decade of python experience. I work with it daily, all my major codebases are written in it. I hate it. It has an ok object system which is possibly its only redeeming quality. I found Racket about 4 years ago, and any new project that I work on will be in Racket or CL. I could go on at length about the happy path mentality of python and the apologists who are too ignorant of other people's use ca…

Two decade Perl programmer who's been using a bunch of Python recently. I don't hate it, but I've not been getting any particularly complicated use-cases. I do miss Moose a lot, and I miss Bread::Board and I miss DBIx::Class, which SQLAlchemy does not make up for. The weird scoping didn't take too long to get right, although string interpolation still takes me too much thinking about. What I am missing from Perl is l…

This resonates with me. I miss working with Perl greatly (my current employer forbids me to write anything on it), and having to deal with Python instead makes me miss it even more.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#573

Post by [deleted] »

Rotareti wrote: post #485
j88439h84 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to this is Poetry. https://poetry.eustace.io It's good. Projects should use it.

I agree. Most of the issues the parent mentions have been solved with poetry and pipenv. And if you need "to create a redistributable executable with all your dependencies". You can either use pyinstaller [0] or nuitka [1] both of which are very actively maintained/developed and continually improving. [0]: https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller [1]: https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

[deleted]

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#574

Post by m45t3r »

zmmmmm wrote: post #196
KirinDave wrote: post #93

Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious... I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future…

Definitely feel the same. The way I think about it is that Python is a strong local optimum in a space that has a massively better optimal solution really close by. But it's nearly impossible to get most people's algorithms to find the real optimum because Python's suboptimal solution is "good enough". And the whole software industry (and in some ways, by extension, all of humanity ... to be over melodramatic) is suf…

> And the whole software industry (and in some ways, by extension, all of humanity ... to be over melodramatic) is suffering for it.

I don't think the biggest services built with Python (think Instagram, Dropbox, etc.) have more consumer-facing issues than services written in other languages.

If you're talking only about developers, fine, however I also think most Python developers like the language. For me it seems that Python has strong vocal critics, that show well in places like HN, however it is not representative of the majority.

So I really don't think Python is making the humanity suffer, for any good measure of suffering.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#575

Post by Ensorceled »

upofadown wrote: post #543
Ensorceled wrote: post #436

Holy Crap! What a lot of irrational, hyperbolic hate for Python. I think everybody should spend their first couple of years working in Fortran IV on IBM TSO/ISPF. No dependency management because you had to write everything yourself. Or maybe [edit: early 90's] C or C++ development where dependency management meant getting packages off a Usenet archive, uudecoding and compiling them yourself after tweaking the config…

Well I actually feel betrayed... Python 1.4 was an awesomely simple programming environment and I pretty much immediately fell in love with it. Then features were added. Now it is a whole home improvement store full of kitchen sinks. I think that programming is a sort of theological process. Popular languages attract ideas. Unfortunately, in the case of Python, those ideas were not effectively filtered and now we hav…

I write a lot of toy/hobby one-off scripts in Python and have since 1.5; what has significantly changed that prevents that type of usage for you?

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#576

Post by blumomo »

Reading all the comments here I have the impression that there are 2 groups of programmers:

There's one group that uses Python regularly and which is getting their stuff done right now.

And there is the other group which has time to complain about Python.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#578

Post by TurboHaskal »

naikrovek wrote: post #524
Rotareti wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably Go will be the next hotness in 5 years. I think it will be difficult to grow a large ecosystem for a language with very poor FFI performance [0] in the long run. Golang's poor FFI performance is the number 1 reason I wouldn't use it for my own projects. [0]: https://github.com/dyu/ffi-overhead

People gripe about the strangest things. After using Go almost exclusively for about 18 months I have had to interface with existing C libraries exactly zero times.

How is FFI remotely strange? Not everyone is doing webdev, and even then, you would be surprised how many libraries are leveraging C ones.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#579

Post by 9q9 »

momentoftop wrote: post #558
9q9 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. That's, as you say, a statically scoped fast exit. One does not need the full power of exceptions for this (exceptions'd dynamic binding comes with a cost). If exceptions are widely used for this purpose, one might consider adding a nicely structured goto to the language. Something like linear delimited continuations?

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were after. Ocaml exceptions are used more generally, and often make use of 2. For instance, the basic stream/iterator in Ocaml is Enum, which always uses an exception to signal when the stream has been exhausted, rather than providing a "has_next" predicate. The catch site of this exception is dynamic.

That is interesting. Once could argue that since fast exceptions contain non-local jumps with a static target, it is enough to supply only the former, so as to simplify the language.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#580

Post by Cpoll »

koolba wrote: post #546
inoop wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would take a Python job over a Java/C/C++/Go/Rust any day it's funny, I feel the exact opposite. I work on a team that maintains a digital catalog, and a lot of what we write is about taking in asset- and metadata files, asynchronously processing them, and then publishing that to a denormalized read-optimized data store. We often joke that we mostly take data from 'over here' and put it 'over there'. All our stuf…

> I honestly wouldn't want to have to write this stuff in Python for a simple reason: I don't think I could live without static typing, which is a fantastic tool when you need to manage a large code base written by multiple people over multiple years. I can make a change in some package, do a dry-run compile of every system that uses it, and then see what needs updating. It gives me certain guarantees about data inte…

> Programming in the large without type safety is a fool’s errand.

Programming in the large without tests is a fool's errand. Type systems don't guarantee correctness.

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