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The Python Paradox (2004)

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#71

Post by VectorLock »

xhevahir wrote: post #58
treeform wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My vote is on Nim. Python like syntax with C++ speed. Unknown enough, but still not too new or obscure.

The community gives me pause. Nim's BDFL seems to have a habit of driving away prominent users of the language. Programmers who had contributed to the compiler have made their own hostile fork, and two of the three people who have written book-length introductions to the language have either given up on Nim or been tempted to do so. (The third is the BDFL himself.) If anyone cares, here's some comments from one of th…

Asserting that the English language can't evolve is a weird take from someone who is trying to evolve a programming language.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#72

Post by selcuka »

lmm wrote: post #53
shubhamjain wrote: post #50

In my experience, programmers obsessed with unconventional programming languages are exactly the ones that prioritize (over) engineering over simply shipping things. If you think, writing your codebase in a funky functional language would bear fruits in the long turn, you're in for a surprise. The road is full of pitfalls. Here are a few I outlined in my essay[1]: 1. Hiring is harder: "When it comes to hiring people,…

I've had the opposite experience. Our competition used a "boring" Ruby on Rails architecture, so they were burning investment capital on cloud hosting every month, meaning they were forced to rush for milestones and cut corners so that they could grasp the next piece of funding before their runway ran out. Meanwhile our "esoteric" codebase meant we could run everything on a couple of servers we owned and spend our ti…

> Meanwhile our "esoteric" codebase meant we could run everything on a couple of servers we owned

A recent, not-boring technology that requires less resources than the old, boring one must be an exception.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#73

Post by arvinsim »

d--b wrote: post #41

Yeah it is dated. Python got hyped and now people learn it because data science hires python people, and data science pays well, not because they care.

I remember Python being hyped for being a good beginner language and a good web programming language(Django, Flask).

It does seem that Python has settled into a niche as one of the mainstream data science languages.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#74

Post by solveit »

deafpolygon wrote: post #36
threeseed wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I have been following PG on Twitter I understand that the reason he has so many good takes is because he has so many takes in general. And most people tend to skip over the incoherent, offensive or just plain dumb ones. I wish more of those weren't flagged to death when people post them here.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

No. People aren't clocks. The best way to make something great is to make ten meh things and discard a hundred crap things. I guarantee you everyone whose takes you admire also have many, many bad takes (which they perhaps don't tweet, but there's a definite trade-off here and PG's lower threshold for tweeting seems to work well enough for his goals).

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#75

Post by benreesman »

aabhay wrote: post #44

Typed python is extremely ugly and frustrating. Does anyone have any good advice on doing it well? It seems like every library has their own system and doing any kind of casting just to make the linter be quiet is such a chore.

Check out https://github.com/google/pytype

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#77

Post by lostcolony »

nwiswell wrote: post #55
canttestthis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook was written in PHP. Mark used one language he knew and a $300B company was built on top of it. This example doesn't further your point at all seeing as they had to over time literally invent an entirely new language to make their PHP codebase scale. And on top of that FB went on to use a whole bunch of uncommon languages (Haskell, Erlang, D, probably a bunch of others I don't know about)

Well, as the counterfactual, you can't invent a buyer who will value your Clojure shop at the last funding round.

As a countercounterfactual, Zuckerberg spent $22 billion (original offer was less, but both due to growth in stock between offer and sale, and retention) for a company with only 35 engineers writing Erlang (Whatsapp).

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#79

Post by VectorLock »

aabhay wrote: post #44

Typed python is extremely ugly and frustrating. Does anyone have any good advice on doing it well? It seems like every library has their own system and doing any kind of casting just to make the linter be quiet is such a chore.

To me it seems like the ugliest parts of every language is the parts dealing with anything but the most simple types. When langs start introducing things like generics, then things really get gruesome.

Thats why I always personally enjoyed duck typing.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#80

Post by VectorLock »

Yoric wrote: post #65
VectorLock wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I've found that teams that focus on easily understandable languages (Python I think is the best with its "executable pseudocode" syntax) are those that are placing value on teamwork rather than individual flexing.

FWIW I've had opposite experiences. :shrug: Each team is different, I guess :)

Teams that focus on hard to understand languages care about communication more?

I - er.. okay.

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