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From Python to NumPy (2017)

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Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#11

Post by DigiDigiorno »

z9znz wrote: post #9
DigiDigiorno wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm half amused and half concerned for your mental health. There are too many places to start a counter argument. It could start with what MLMs actually are, it could be that many businesses don't care about the talks and use scipy packages, it could be the cause and effect confusion of scipy packages existing and academic users using them--which relates to the Ruby part. But seriously, I hope I'm wrong, but your pos…

His MLM analogy does not fit, but I think the point is that Python got where it is because of luck. If the scientific computing and research community (and plenty of physicists) had known a better language, they would not be using Python now. Maybe it helps that Python was installed by default on many Linux systems, and Ruby was not. Much of the success of Python these days is related to non-CompSci users. And no off…

I agree with everything you say (in fact another post I made on this page deals with "it should be NumPy to Python" because so many people learn the language through some popular library)

I agree with your points, but the only counterpoint I will make is that Python was created as a simple scripting language that could utilize lower language code. Basically it's a convenient wrapper for faster c code. So the fact that Python is populated with scientific libraries that are optimized in c is not purely luck. That said, like a lot of things in life, it's the combination of viability and luck that lead to success.

Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#12

Post by DigiDigiorno »

z9znz wrote: post #10
l33t2328 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is prothletising a free tool an MLM scheme?

I'm guessing the parent poster really meant something like "hyped snake oil". There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming. In fact, it is poorly designed for most software engineering goals, short of just simple one-file, few line scripts. But those could just as well have been written in many other languages. Python just happene…

Referring to Python hype as "snake oil" is hilarious; I recommend anyone arguing the underlying thought use it.

Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#13

Post by boredemployee »

z9znz wrote: post #8

Numpy is a great thing, and also a terrible thing (because it is built on Python). Python is a terrible language compared to many others, not the least of which is Ruby (and I would include Java, Clojure, Elixir, and even C++ and probably C# and almost certainly F# if I knew them well). To make matters worse, there's a common mentality amongst Pythonistas of being aggressively complacent. A typical response to a ques…

Sorry, that discussion is so overrated and elitist. I'll never understand people complaining about one technology/language/tool that made it possible to dozens of people to join to the - once restrict - small club which was computer science and which is now making it possible to a lot of people to get a job with an easy to learn and less verbose language. One can argue about speed/memory/better languages out there to make data science (hello Julia) but that's just how the world out there works. Python has a great/dope community that I didn't find when I worked with C back in the day, for example.

Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#14

Post by z9znz »

DigiDigiorno wrote: post #12
z9znz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the parent poster really meant something like "hyped snake oil". There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming. In fact, it is poorly designed for most software engineering goals, short of just simple one-file, few line scripts. But those could just as well have been written in many other languages. Python just happene…

Referring to Python hype as "snake oil" is hilarious; I recommend anyone arguing the underlying thought use it.

I use Python all day every day. It's horrible compared to many other languages I have used.

There are many versions of hype promoted for Python. Coal powered steam locomotives were great in their day, before there were better alternatives. But we don't irrationally hold the mentality that there is nothing better and why would you need anything else anyway?

Tell me any library which can only be built for Python?

Tell me any feature of Python which does not exist in one or more other languages?

Then I'll tell you at least some features which exist in several other languages but which do not in Python.

Python is inferior, and frankly anyone who is infatuated with it is ignorant of the other, better options.

Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#15

Post by dragonwriter »

z9znz wrote: post #10
l33t2328 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is prothletising a free tool an MLM scheme?

I'm guessing the parent poster really meant something like "hyped snake oil". There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming. In fact, it is poorly designed for most software engineering goals, short of just simple one-file, few line scripts. But those could just as well have been written in many other languages. Python just happene…

> There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming.

The amount of anger people have that things that, in fact, determine suitability for various applications are not the things which ought to do so in their own mental models of the world is... interesting.

Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#16

Post by mistrial9 »

DigiDigiorno wrote: post #11
z9znz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His MLM analogy does not fit, but I think the point is that Python got where it is because of luck. If the scientific computing and research community (and plenty of physicists) had known a better language, they would not be using Python now. Maybe it helps that Python was installed by default on many Linux systems, and Ruby was not. Much of the success of Python these days is related to non-CompSci users. And no off…

I agree with everything you say (in fact another post I made on this page deals with "it should be NumPy to Python" because so many people learn the language through some popular library) I agree with your points, but the only counterpoint I will make is that Python was created as a simple scripting language that could utilize lower language code. Basically it's a convenient wrapper for faster c code. So the fact tha…

to re-state the obvious, as a low-level C programmer by training, Python is exactly "a simple scripting language that could utilize lower language (C-linking) code." I wrote language glue for C libraries long ago, Python fit well and that is what I use it for to this day, decades later.

maybe people without the C background do not see that at all?

Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#17

Post by rahimnathwani »

dang wrote: post #4

Discussed at the time: From Python to Numpy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13355034 - Jan 2017 (48 comments)

Thanks. I clicked on 'past' immediately after posting, but all I saw were Algolia search results for the keywords in the title. If I'd seen it had been posted before, I probably would have deleted my post. ISTR 'past' used to show matches for the URL, and not the title. Perhaps I'm mistaken.

Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#18

Post by oivey »

z9znz wrote: post #9
DigiDigiorno wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm half amused and half concerned for your mental health. There are too many places to start a counter argument. It could start with what MLMs actually are, it could be that many businesses don't care about the talks and use scipy packages, it could be the cause and effect confusion of scipy packages existing and academic users using them--which relates to the Ruby part. But seriously, I hope I'm wrong, but your pos…

His MLM analogy does not fit, but I think the point is that Python got where it is because of luck. If the scientific computing and research community (and plenty of physicists) had known a better language, they would not be using Python now. Maybe it helps that Python was installed by default on many Linux systems, and Ruby was not. Much of the success of Python these days is related to non-CompSci users. And no off…

The “luck” Python ran into was that some people came together to write NumPy. The alternatives at the time were Matlab and R. Matlab is not a great general programming language and is expensive. R has esoteric syntax and also isn’t a great general purpose language. This shift didn’t happen so long ago that it can’t be remembered. It certainly didn’t happen because it was installed by default by some Linux distros.

For better or worse (and honestly, probably often for better), people writing scientific Python care about solving a particular numerical problem. Code quality often matters less than just getting the right answer. Knowledge of a language or code quality is rarely the hard or important part.

Scientists generally spend time learning math and software engineers spend time learning good design practices. It shouldn’t be a great surprise what each group becomes good at. Time is finite.

Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#19

Post by boberoni »

boredemployee wrote: post #13
z9znz wrote: post #8

Numpy is a great thing, and also a terrible thing (because it is built on Python). Python is a terrible language compared to many others, not the least of which is Ruby (and I would include Java, Clojure, Elixir, and even C++ and probably C# and almost certainly F# if I knew them well). To make matters worse, there's a common mentality amongst Pythonistas of being aggressively complacent. A typical response to a ques…

Sorry, that discussion is so overrated and elitist. I'll never understand people complaining about one technology/language/tool that made it possible to dozens of people to join to the - once restrict - small club which was computer science and which is now making it possible to a lot of people to get a job with an easy to learn and less verbose language. One can argue about speed/memory/better languages out there to…

> Python has a great/dope community

Python's community is one of the greatest and worst parts of the language. Python might not be the best language for anything, but it's the second best language for everything.

I've dabbled in many programming languages, a lot of which are backed by a single large company or consultancy:

- Java (Oracle, at least initially)

- TypeScript, C# (Microsoft)

- Golang, Dart (Google)

- Elixir (Nubank)

- Clojure (Cognitect)

- Kotlin (JetBrains)

- Objective-C, Swift (Apple)

- Julia (Julia Computing)

Then, there are languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Rust, etc. that are more diversified and distributed in terms of core contributors, maintainers, and evangelists. Meanwhile, there's a long list of other lesser known languages that have failed to grow a community as large as Python's.

As I get older and older, I have realized that our programming languages are not static entities, but they change and evolve over time. They are influenced by users, companies, and researchers. I hope that one day, there's a humanities subject that studies programming languages just like we study natural languages like in linguistics. The closest thing right now seems to be history of science, but it's quite a broad field.

Re: From Python to NumPy (2017)

#20

Post by DigiDigiorno »

z9znz wrote: post #14
DigiDigiorno wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Referring to Python hype as "snake oil" is hilarious; I recommend anyone arguing the underlying thought use it.

I use Python all day every day. It's horrible compared to many other languages I have used. There are many versions of hype promoted for Python. Coal powered steam locomotives were great in their day, before there were better alternatives. But we don't irrationally hold the mentality that there is nothing better and why would you need anything else anyway? Tell me any library which can only be built for Python? Tell…

Anyone who is "infatuated" with ANY tool is likely ignorant of alternatives.

That said, I think python is a very convenient wrapper for lower language utilizing scipy libraries. I also think it is great for quick prototyping. (It's been a couple years, but I even prototyped PySide Qt stuff in ipython notebooks, now Jupyter notebooks, back in the day).

Now, simply the popularity (perhaps created by luck), led to a huge ecosystem of scipy tools for the science community. That in-and-of-itself snowballed into a reason to use it. Could that have happened to a different language? Yes. but that doesn't invalidate that it DID happen to Python.

Perhaps your day job forces you to use the Python hammer for a screw problem; I'm sure that problem frustrates a lot of us working people, but I don't think it's inferior for the specific uses I outlined.

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