31–40 of 156 posts
It doesn't matter about its quirks. The most important thing nowadays is that it's reached critical mass. We're at the point where even non-developers can now cobble together a bit of python code to do simple things to make their jobs easier. This means it's here forever, IMO.
The article has a silly premise - I don't know anybody who would claim it's a great programming language. For the moment, it's just the most practical in certain areas (notably data science and machine learning.)
This person clearly doesn’t understand programming languages so well. Sorry to make this response an “ad hominem” one, I should revoke the claims. But it’s impossible if they don’t understand basic concepts of programming languages.
For example, complaining that a dictionary key must be place in quotes. It’s not that “the key needs quotes”, but that you’re using “a string” as a key. In fact in Python, you can use any immutable object as a key (tuples, for example). They clearly come from Javascript, Python works differently (and arguably better), and they’re complaining that it doesn’t work the way they’d like it to work.
Then complaining about list comprehensions as a “weirdo” thing. Clearly not understanding the functional paradigm and the beauty of expressions (see Smalltalk for the ultimate example of beauty and expressiveness).
I love Rob Pikes idea that is dumb to have scope determined by invisible characters
It makes scope visual and consistent. IMO it's less dumb than having scope defined by pairs of curly braces which are impossible to read without indentation and require extra effort to keep matched - unless you try to automate the matching with a good IDE.
So you end up having the same obligation you call out as a complaint regardless?
I used an IDE with visible white space on to help with Pythons requirement?
This list is so deliciously sophomoric. The best one is, and I quote: """To many other weirdo bits of magic syntax, like [list comprehensions]""" Obviously without actually proposing how comprehensions could be made better one has to hope the author would say he likes the equivalent Haskell better, but there is a strong doubt that is not the case.
I personally find list comprehensions in python pretty horrible. They seem to exist only to do lots of stuff in one single line of code. You end up with totally impenetrable unreadable perl-esq garbage write-once-read-never code that is too clever for its own good. And people say python is easy to learn and good for beginners...! A better approach would be something like Java Streams/.net Lync/RxX pattern IMO. Explic…