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The Python Paradox (2004)

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#271

Post by tasuki »

TchoBeer wrote: post #217
tasuki wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not because the languages are particularly difficult or arcane, it's mainly because people don't already know it, and people don't like to learn to do things differently: their experience stands in the way. I'm somewhat of a fan of Haskell (though its standard library is awful) and very much a fan of Idris (at the very least it's a better-Haskell, at best, dependent types!), but hard disagree. These languages…

Alternatively, getting started with Java you quickly hit polymorphism, inheritance, getters-and-setters, and null object handling. And yet everyone in my intro to CS class in uni managed to pick up Java within a week or two. Haskell is a bit more involved than Python, but not more involved than most languages.

Yes, Java is kind of the worst of both worlds. You have to learn new concepts and they aren't even very useful concepts.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#272

Post by planetis »

zmmmmm wrote: post #123
xhevahir wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting. I saw shades of this when I tried porting a tool over to Nim, found it was much slower than trivial code in Python and Groovy, then stumbled into this discussion: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/9026 Nothing as strong as the above but it definitely rubbed me the wrong way. So much advertising about Nim being efficient/fast and the default way to read a file is incredibly slow and inefficient ....…

That issue is about readLine specifically right? Not reading a file in general. The only time I get to ever use readLine is to solve adventofcode problems.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#273

Post by planetis »

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…

That's really petty argument against nim and it makes me sad really. 'Hostile' fork isn't true, just a fork. I wish you the best.

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#274

Post by cabalamat »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #146
cabalamat wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python has types now (though it didn't when I wrote the 36kLOC program I had in mind). What problems are there with python variable scoping -- you can have global and local variables, shouldn't that be enough?

> though it didn't when I wrote the 36kLOC program I had in mind). Yeah, that was my assumption. Still, typing in Python feels very clunky compared to TypeScript. And even though it is much better after 3.8 and 3.9 updates, the adoption of typing in various useful libraries was relatively low as far as I remember. > What problems are there with python variable scoping -- you can have global and local variables, shoul…

> Yeah, that was my assumption. Still, typing in Python feels very clunky compared to TypeScript.

I used comments in the code to say what the types were, e.g.:

    def processNotesForm(d):
        """ process the notes form
        @param d::{str:str} = the form data
        """
Of course in modern Python one would simply say:

    def processNotesForm(d: Dict[str,str]):

Re: The Python Paradox (2004)

#275

Post by xhevahir »

planetis wrote: post #273
xhevahir wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's really petty argument against nim and it makes me sad really. 'Hostile' fork isn't true, just a fork. I wish you the best.

Most language fail to gain traction for reasons that don't have anything to do with the design of the language itself--even "petty" ones, such as the tactlessness of the people in charge. I don't want to use a technology which few other people use and which has, in my estimation, an unpromising future.
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