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Thank You, Guido

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Re: Thank You, Guido

#301

Post by draw_down »

depressedpanda wrote: post #220
not2b wrote: post #16

Did you notice this: "He has already put into motion the conversion of the Dropbox server code from Python 2 to Python 3." Even the company that hired Guido is still heavily dependent on Python 2, and it doesn't surprise me at all; my own employer still has a lot of it in internal tools.

I, for one, would very much enjoy if posts about Python on HN didn't -- without exception -- contain threads about py2 vs py3. We get it, some people are unhappy that py2 is deprecated. But whatever sympathy I might hold for that viewpoint is drowned out by the incessant and unproductive whining I keep seeing here. Can we please move on now?

That strikes me as rather churlish. Moving on is the whole point- even the company who employs the Python guy can't seem to move on. Seems relevant IMO.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#302

Post by icebraining »

RaiseProfits wrote: post #184
doc_gunthrop wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That coincides with the following: > Code is read many more times than it is written. Writing code costs something , but over time the cost of reading is often higher. Anyone who ever looks at a piece of code has to invest brain-power into figuring out what it does.[1] This is also noted in PEP8: > One of Guido's key insights is that code is read much more often than it is written. The guidelines provided here are in…

Who would have thought the best argument against an 80 character cap in pep8 would come from guido himself?

Anyone who charitably reads what he writes.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#303

Post by AnimalMuppet »

kazinator wrote: post #286
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It was done at least once" != "it was a good choice", though. There's a reason why most OSes are not written in Lisp, and it's not because the OS writers aren't smart enough to learn Lisp. It's not because they don't know it exists. It's because there are better languages to write an OS in.

Writing an OS in Lisp basically means adapting or developing, and then growing, a Lisp implementation on the bare hardware. Someone would only do this if they are simultaneously interested in OS research R&D and Lisp implementation R&D. This is different from someone working on an OS in, say, C. They just pick some C compiler and use it, without becoming a C researcher and implementor. (They might bemoan some things…

I'm not sure I agree with this. How much assembly would you actually have to write to bootstrap a Lisp? If I understand correctly, not much. And you could cross-compile from some other platform for as long as needed as you use the Lisp to write the OS.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#304

Post by icemelt8 »

wil421 wrote: post #215
aerovistae wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was like a language I always knew that I never spoke before. God that's well put

Agreed. Learning Python for side projects and hobby stuff. The zen is real. It’s making me dislike writing JavaScript at my day job.

I am the opposite, I don't like Python but I love JS.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#305

Post by Insanity »

mongol wrote: post #172
mcny wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a go programmer but I would love to revisit this conversation but with golang twenty years from now. Please correct me if I am wrong but I believe golang is essentially complete, right? and golang programmers like golang?

Go is not complete. But it does not evolve by revolution as of now.

Complete is hard to define, no language stops evolving. But Go language is perfectly suitable for large projects, and is pretty much my Go-to nowadays. (Pun intended)

Re: Thank You, Guido

#306

Post by therealdrag0 »

hinkley wrote: post #288
wutbrodo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if you're smart, it's just really fun to make things dense and logically concise. Think of it like a minor form of code golf. My first CL at my first job out of college was writing a state machine at Google. I remember collapsing it into this dense, elegant representation by hinging on a couple of bits of state. It took me an extra half day, but I was really proud of the end result, and I remember being mil…

My best friend in college was a writer, pursuing a BA in Literature. I’ve been thinking again lately about little bits I picked up via osmosis and my own early creative writing experiences. In fact I was just noting a couple weeks ago how refactoring resembles an exploratory writing exercise. I think we need to embrace the creative writing similarities. Would we ever celebrate an author who published efficient, dense…

Love the analogy. I'm a SE with a English degree. Maybe that is why I care so much (more than those around me) about editing code and finding the readability sweet spot.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#307

Post by microcolonel »

papln wrote: post #274
riazrizvi wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding string , the breaking change was necessary because it was a double-duty type, sometimes acting as a byte-array and other times acting as a string. Meaning some of its functions, like string.length() , gave a value that only made sense for string-as-byte-array, but not as string-as-simple-list-of-characters. More detail on Stackoverflow if you want ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5471158/typeerror-str-…

string.length() still doesn't make sense in Python 3 There's nothing "simple" about "list of characters" in Unicode. Discussed at length at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18154667 Here's how a Unicode export with 20 years of experience in Unicode explained it: https://blog.golang.org/strings > Some people think Go strings are always UTF-8, but they are not: only string literals are UTF-8. As we showed in the p…

Even in Unicode-aware applications, it is generally not that useful to segment just by codepoint, you more often really want to segment by extended grapheme cluster.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#308

Post by egypturnash »

hinkley wrote: post #288
wutbrodo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if you're smart, it's just really fun to make things dense and logically concise. Think of it like a minor form of code golf. My first CL at my first job out of college was writing a state machine at Google. I remember collapsing it into this dense, elegant representation by hinging on a couple of bits of state. It took me an extra half day, but I was really proud of the end result, and I remember being mil…

My best friend in college was a writer, pursuing a BA in Literature. I’ve been thinking again lately about little bits I picked up via osmosis and my own early creative writing experiences. In fact I was just noting a couple weeks ago how refactoring resembles an exploratory writing exercise. I think we need to embrace the creative writing similarities. Would we ever celebrate an author who published efficient, dense…

Hemmingway.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#309

Post by lowercased »

dannypgh wrote: post #121
dexen wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly enough, PHP is a good example of environment that doesn't break backward compatibility much. About the only change that had a significant impact on projects I worked on was removal of the 'mysql' DB extension (replaced by 'mysqli' and 'PDO'). For an older project I created a few shim functions and it still works just fine. While frameworks come and go, the core of the language is highly backward compatib…

If your timeframe goes back to PHP4, this most certainly isn't true. Just one glance of https://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.keywords.php should prove this - every new keyword is a backwards incompatible change. And I mention this because I used to support software that used, as a variable name, something which became a reserved word...

as a variable name, wouldn't it have been prefixed with $ ?

the XML parsing was probably the biggest BC change I hit between 4 and 5.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#310

Post by Skunkleton »

xtracto wrote: post #294
ohduran wrote: post #22

I hated C++ and Matlab as an undergraduate. Hell, I hated programming as a whole - and effectively swear never to write a line of code once I was done with my BSc in Physics. Then, at work, I was introduced to Python. It was so...obvious, for lack of a better world. It was like a language I always knew that never spoke before. I'm now a software engineer, write Python almost all day, and looking back to the 18-year o…

Interesting. I myself come form an Software Engineering background, and started programming very young in Logo (a LISP derivate), then BASIC, C, C++, Java, Ruby and a bunch of others. I have hated programming in Python every time I have had to do it (several times through my career). It I think the only language that I have really hated ... the language itself. I've done Z80 and 8086 assembly, I've done Prolog, I've…

I'm not sure how you can be annoyed by Python, but not by VB.
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