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Drawbacks of Python

quora.com

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Re: Drawbacks of Python

#11

Post by metalliqaz »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #4
metalliqaz wrote: post #3

From the article: > Strings were just a sequence of bytes in Python 2, but now are Unicode by default. Much better. whelp, not trusting this guy's judgement anymore

While the sentence is a bit weird, along the lines of "That word is made up." "All words are made up." strings ARE potentially harder to deal with in 2 than 3.

in my experience, most people want bytestrings most of the time, and the main effect of changing the str type has been to drive a lot of traffic to SO when they have encoding errors trying to deal with strings that used to "just work" in 2.7

Re: Drawbacks of Python

#12

Post by beagle3 »

rjmunro wrote: post #9

The main drawback of python for me, compared to NodeJS is the whole sharing projects onto different machines with virtualenv or whatever. package.json and node_modules just works by default in so much cleaner a way. You can use npm or yarn or just a zip of the node_modules to share the environment with a colleague or to deploy.

conda solves that for python at least as well as npm/yarn does. I don't understand while it is not in wider use (except for lack of PR).

Re: Drawbacks of Python

#13

Post by wlesieutre »

roland35 wrote: post #6

I agree with the response that there are a few "gotchas" with python, like with any language! I have gotten caught up with a few type problems when dealing with sending raw binary data over serial and things like that - but luckily python has great unit testing frameworks to help with this. My main beef with python is that it is harder to deploy projects to other people, without them setting up a virtual environment…

I have the same two complaints. I’ve automated some large tasks at my job with Python, and avoided external dependencies because while I’m sure I could deal with it, nobody else here is a programmer and it don’t think it would go well if someone had to try and figure that out later. “Install python (3.6 or later), point script at the csv file” avoids that complexity.

It’d be better if it were a self contained executable with a GUI but not worth the time to figure that out.

I messed around with TkInter a while back, not sure if anything's new since then. For executables there was py2exe, cx_freeze, and PyInstaller, but the situation with packaging DLLs into an executable that would actually work on someone else's computer was iffy last I checked.

Re: Drawbacks of Python

#14

Post by metalliqaz »

roland35 wrote: post #6

I agree with the response that there are a few "gotchas" with python, like with any language! I have gotten caught up with a few type problems when dealing with sending raw binary data over serial and things like that - but luckily python has great unit testing frameworks to help with this. My main beef with python is that it is harder to deploy projects to other people, without them setting up a virtual environment…

I also run up against the deploying problem quite a bit. For the most part, only Windows has been a real issue for me. Lately I've use Cython and found that adds an even tougher layer of difficulty to the problem.

Re: Drawbacks of Python

#15

Post by WilliamEdward »

roland35 wrote: post #6

I agree with the response that there are a few "gotchas" with python, like with any language! I have gotten caught up with a few type problems when dealing with sending raw binary data over serial and things like that - but luckily python has great unit testing frameworks to help with this. My main beef with python is that it is harder to deploy projects to other people, without them setting up a virtual environment…

All true, but I don't think python's really supposed to be perfect for making desktop apps, its lack of static typing means a large scale app would end up becoming a pain to maintain.

That's why it is best used in small teams for data science and scripting; run once and never look back. Most complaints about python IMO fail to appreciate its design philosophy.

Re: Drawbacks of Python

#16

Post by vangourd »

roland35 wrote: post #6

I agree with the response that there are a few "gotchas" with python, like with any language! I have gotten caught up with a few type problems when dealing with sending raw binary data over serial and things like that - but luckily python has great unit testing frameworks to help with this. My main beef with python is that it is harder to deploy projects to other people, without them setting up a virtual environment…

I know you mentioned the build tools but I didn't know if you knew they can work with Qt.

QT for Python and The Fman build system would allow you to deploy in some cases a single executable. https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt/Deploying_PyQt_Application...

That being said I had issues getting everything installed correctly with Pipenv and then locking the specific versions that are compatible. fman and pyside2.

A GUI builder comes with the Pyside2 package qtdesigner.exe I think.

Re: Drawbacks of Python

#17

Post by beagle3 »

metalliqaz wrote: post #11
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the sentence is a bit weird, along the lines of "That word is made up." "All words are made up." strings ARE potentially harder to deal with in 2 than 3.

in my experience, most people want bytestrings most of the time, and the main effect of changing the str type has been to drive a lot of traffic to SO when they have encoding errors trying to deal with strings that used to "just work" in 2.7

The thing about "just works" in 2.7 is that it does ... until it doesn't, and when it doesn't, it's often way harder to resolve.

If you're only using the original ASCII (ordinals 0-127), all is well, and the py3 distinction between strings and bytes seems to get in the way. But as soon as you have a single character in your input or data which is not ASCII, a lot of things stop working and it isn't even clear why, or how to fix it -- often, the error comes from a library-within-a-library-within-a-library, which did some manipulation that (wrongly) assumed some encoding or its properties.

Re: Drawbacks of Python

#18

Post by metalliqaz »

wlesieutre wrote: post #13
roland35 wrote: post #6

I agree with the response that there are a few "gotchas" with python, like with any language! I have gotten caught up with a few type problems when dealing with sending raw binary data over serial and things like that - but luckily python has great unit testing frameworks to help with this. My main beef with python is that it is harder to deploy projects to other people, without them setting up a virtual environment…

I have the same two complaints. I’ve automated some large tasks at my job with Python, and avoided external dependencies because while I’m sure I could deal with it, nobody else here is a programmer and it don’t think it would go well if someone had to try and figure that out later. “Install python (3.6 or later), point script at the csv file” avoids that complexity. It’d be better if it were a self contained executa…

I've found that the built-in tkinter lib is good enough for basic GUIs that you might use on a utility.

Re: Drawbacks of Python

#20

Post by dec0dedab0de »

wlesieutre wrote: post #13
roland35 wrote: post #6

I agree with the response that there are a few "gotchas" with python, like with any language! I have gotten caught up with a few type problems when dealing with sending raw binary data over serial and things like that - but luckily python has great unit testing frameworks to help with this. My main beef with python is that it is harder to deploy projects to other people, without them setting up a virtual environment…

I have the same two complaints. I’ve automated some large tasks at my job with Python, and avoided external dependencies because while I’m sure I could deal with it, nobody else here is a programmer and it don’t think it would go well if someone had to try and figure that out later. “Install python (3.6 or later), point script at the csv file” avoids that complexity. It’d be better if it were a self contained executa…

if you just want to make a self contained executable for windows users I've used py2exe a few times and it always works well. It's basically one command and it gives you an exe of your .py file

https://pypi.org/project/py2exe/

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