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Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
#52I agree with the sentiment that these reasons are terrible.
My main gripes:
- the half hearted take on static types
- excessive use of mutability and imperative programming
- dependency, version management and compatibility.
For this last one. Are there recommended best practices? I noticed that pip recently added a “constraints” file option which seems like it’s going towards at least the lock file level of guarantees that node has. Or do people still recommend using a separate manager (conda/miniconda).
Re: Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
#53I just want to say, working with python in an air gapped environment is fucking painful too.
I am not working with it directly but indirectly with ansible, and one of the playbooks (or "collections" in the latest iterations of ansible) has a stupid requirement to perform a pip install some random packages. Maybe there is a way to compile those packages offline and tell pip to use a tar ball. But I couldn't figure it out so I just commented out those specific steps. I even went so far as to grok the repo for any references to this package but couldn't find anything.
On the other hand, I do appreciate python's concise syntax and makes it easy to write a few powerful one liners.
Re: Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
any language with immutability by default, say Clojure.
If the object is immutable you can't really tell if it was passed by value or by reference. It becomes an implementation detail.
Yep, one of the theoretical promises of FP that’s totally vindicated (unless there’s a language bug, but they usually get this much right). And because you can’t tell, you don’t need to care.
For folks working in imperative languages, you can achieve this same bliss by either not modifying your function parameters in the first place (hopefully this is obvious if you care about the distinction and find the language behavior ambiguous)… or by just doing whatever copy/clone/value transfer would be appropriate as a first step if you have good reason to modify the value of a parameter to your otherwise pure function.
Re: Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
#55Overopinionated engineers are annoying. Python doesn't suck, everyone knows that. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses. Clickbaity.
> everyone knows that Uh, no. There’s a reason I prefer Node, Deno or Rust, and the reason is that Python sucks. Or at least sucks more than either of those.
This reflects more on you than the language: no language is perfect but if something is popular and successfully used for many projects, it’s unlikely that it reaches the level of “sucks”. It’s far more interesting to talk about what traits you like or don’t like because those are things which can be evaluated by readers who can mull how relevant your experience is to them. For example, if you say you’re working on embedded systems a lot of people will likely agree that Python isn’t a great fit but also that experience is only partially relevant to someone who builds web apps or works in data science.
Re: Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
#56Here's a better list. * Performance is very bad. * Misspelling a variable creates a new one. * __init__ is a really terrible name for the constructor. * Type annotations are ignored, so nobody bothers.
Indeed, this list is better.
Re: Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
#57Yeah, as much as I hate python (after 10 years of a career based solely in it), “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” Although if I made a list it probably wouldn't match this one. Reason 1 and 2 are basically the same, and yeah this sucks and I wish I could just build a static binary like Go. I'm surprised more languages don't make this very easy! Reason 3,…
> > Finding a list of what can be imported is non-intuitive. With C, you can just look in /usr/include/*.h. But with Python? It's best to use 'python -v' to list all of the places it looks, and then search every file in every directory and subdirectory from that list
> I don't think C/C++ is actually that much better at this?
Yeah, I really don’t know how someone could work with C and not have experience with include or linker path issues. The section on installation shows he doesn’t understand how Linux packaging works, though, so I think it’s something along the lines of a mental model which doesn’t include the extensive time which the Debian / Fedora maintainers have spent packaging that code, or that the reason why they’re not having versioning issues is that they’re using systems which only change the version on system upgrades. He could have avoided those issues with Python by only using the distribution packages just as with the C libraries, or done the inverse by preparing packages for a newer version of some C library.
Re: Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
#58Some of the author's "reasons" are bogus: "My code for Python 3.5 won't work with the Python 3.7 installation unless I intentionally port it to 3.7." Sure it will, just invoke it using the Python 3.7 interpreter. I have plenty of code originally written with 3.5 that runs just fine under 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, ... "In Python, you have to work to pass variables by value." No, you don't. Python actually doesn't pass variables…
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Re: Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
#59"Reason 7: Pass By Object Reference": isn't this the case of almost every GC'd language? Java, JS, PHP, Swift, and C# all do so, although C# doesn't if your type is a "struct" not a class. Go is the only popular exception I can think of.
Also Lisp and Smalltalk & descendants pass by reference.
Re: Reasons Python Sucks (2018)
#60Overopinionated engineers are annoying. Python doesn't suck, everyone knows that. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses. Clickbaity.
It would be an okay provocative title if the criticism was well-founded (which can certainly be done for Python), but most of the article is rather poor.