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The Python Paradox (2004)

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#111

Post by tincholio »

cvccvroomvroom wrote: post #24

It was right then, but it's kind of dated and misses an evolutionary lesson: beautiful code isn't enough, it has to be safe, beautiful, maintainable, productive, understandable, and resource efficient. Ruby is still great for throwing something together fast and maintaining it until it runs into scale problems. It added gradual typing with sorbet and RBS. Crystal is a neat typed, compiled Ruby-alike but it's buggy. R…

I totally agree with your take (at least for the languages I know, out of the ones you mention). For me that right balance of beauty, productivity, and so on came with Clojure. I now find it painful to use any other language, tbh.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#112

Post by nequo »

sugersvoltet wrote: post #105
noobermin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is "not as used" but it has a following who hype it to the point that I've avoided taking time to relearn it just due to the strange vibes I get from their community. These people once mentioned, on twitter, that people who hate systemd are like reactionaries (as in, politically far right), as if a choice of init is a correlative of political ideology. When you view others' preferences for fucking software as so…

>These people once mentioned, on twitter, that people who hate systemd are like reactionaries (as in, politically far right), as if a choice of init is a correlative of political ideology. When you view others' preferences for fucking software as so important to your world view that they might as well be nazis[0], you can tell your priorities are not in order. I hate that everything is politically-coded nowadays, but…

Rust is to C what systemd is to /etc/rc. Both C and /etc/rc are defining characteristics of old-school Unix culture, so it kind of makes sense even just on account of that that folks who hate systemd also hate Rust.

What puzzles me is that OpenBSD people seem to be quite actively opposed to Rust too. They are the project that disables hyperthreading for security reasons, runs ld to relink the kernel after every boot to shuffle memory addresses, patches all sorts of software to support capability self-limiting with pledge, and so on. And the idea of using a fast memory-safe language is somehow nonsensical to them. It is hard for me to take this opposition as motivated by security.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#113

Post by noobermin »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #88
noobermin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is "not as used" but it has a following who hype it to the point that I've avoided taking time to relearn it just due to the strange vibes I get from their community. These people once mentioned, on twitter, that people who hate systemd are like reactionaries (as in, politically far right), as if a choice of init is a correlative of political ideology. When you view others' preferences for fucking software as so…

Genuine question: Maybe the pro systemd people meant the word reactionary in it's non-left/right definition? From Wikipedia: "In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society" [0] I've heard people use 'reactionary' to mean "doesn't want things to change", or "wants things to go back to the wa…

They didn't. They implied it as a political association. I've since lost the thread unfortunately...

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#115

Post by noobermin »

threeseed wrote: post #39
noobermin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is "not as used" but it has a following who hype it to the point that I've avoided taking time to relearn it just due to the strange vibes I get from their community. These people once mentioned, on twitter, that people who hate systemd are like reactionaries (as in, politically far right), as if a choice of init is a correlative of political ideology. When you view others' preferences for fucking software as so…

The difference is that Java has alway been driven from the enterprise. And so there has been this long investment in frameworks, libraries etc that no one would ever otherwise write. Especially areas like governance, security, compliance, reliability etc. I think Rust is just going to end up just being a better C++ not a true mainstream language.

When you say enterprise, who do you mean? Rust is absolutely being pushed by faang et al for example. Just look at the bottom of the Rust foundation page[0]. You do not see this support for things like Nim or Julia[1].

[0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/

[1] I checked, it looks like intel is funding julia development to some extent. The rest is government research orgs like NSF and DARPA. Okay, that's "large org" support on some scale, although it's clearly because julia is meant for science, not industry.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#116

Post by ruszki »

VectorLock wrote: post #80
Yoric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve never seen hard to understand language, just hard to understand code. Without exception. Do you have any specific in your mind?

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#117

Post by drewm1980 »

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.

Use a powerful IDE and lower your expectations. Python is halfway through a decades long transition to being a statically typed language, but there is no consensus that that's where we're going, so a minority of libraries will be a pain in the typechecker for the foreseeable future.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#118

Post by roenxi »

omershapira wrote: post #52

Funny how emergence works with tools. Give a language too few tools but viral circumstances - the ecosystem diverges (Lisps, Javascript). Give it too long an iteration time but killer guarantees, you end up with committees. Python not falling into either of these traps should be understood as nothing short of magic in emergence. I only recently discovered that python's reference typechecker, mypy, has a small side pr…

> Imagine reading the C++wg release notes in the same mood that you would the python release notes.

Which mood are we talking about here? Mild dread? They keep adding new features to the language. The Python programming language is around 30. The release notes at this point should be "wow, we found a bug this year! Didn't expect to see one of those!".

The secret of Python is it is actually a large community all learning to program together. They all discovered static typing together, they're all learning about functional techniques together (removing reduce() from core Python was a really interesting move), yada yada. It is a happy, productive and cohesive community. Probably a study in how to build a community around a programming language.

But one of the reasons I like Clojure is they don't have release notes any more, the release notes are basically "hey we're working on some libraries". They built something extremely powerful and it is done, because there isn't any more power needed in the core. If you invest in learning a tool, the tool shouldn't sprout a new handle and expect to be held differently.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#119

Post by drewm1980 »

zo1 wrote: post #100
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.

If you're doing casting its probably a code smell and good indicator of something being off, or you're doing something too exotic. I'd say this applies a good amount to normal compiled languages too. To do types well, I'd recommend constraining as much as possible. E.g. if a library gives you a union of 5 possible return types, just type it as one of them that you know you'll get and don't let that "complexity" propa…

I agree. It is not perfect, but if pycharm can't figure out the type of an object, humans can't be expected to either.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#120

Post by zmmmmm »

ShredKazoo wrote: post #94
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 used to interview people for data science roles. We let people use whatever language they wanted in the interview. I expected to see a split between Python and R, but the reality was that almost everyone used Python, which was a bit of a surprise. It's even more surprising to me given that Pandas is such a poorly designed library. (Apparently the guy who developed it was learning Python while he was writing Pandas.…

even more surprising is matplotlib .... the most infuriating plotting library I've encountered and yet its de facto standard for most of data science now!
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