Python's “disappointing” superpowers
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Python's “disappointing” superpowers
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Re: Python's “disappointing” superpowers
#2Before I read this article I was not aware of exclusive advantages to dynamic typing.
At least now I know what is achievable despite its presence.
Re: Python's “disappointing” superpowers
#3Is there any language out there that improves on Python in various ways but still allows convenient access to literally the entirety of Python's ecosystem of libraries?
Re: Python's “disappointing” superpowers
#4> I’m worried that a de-facto move away from dynamic stuff in the Python ecosystem, possibly motivated by those who use Python only because they have to, and just want to make it more like the C# or Java they are comfortable with, could leave us with the very worst of all worlds.
It is certainly happening, and I'm not sure Python the language is all the better for it. I say that as a guy who explicitly mentioned this "Python Is Not Java" blog-post during my first job interview as a professional programmer, more than 15 years ago.
Re: Python's “disappointing” superpowers
#5Don't fool yourself- if your programming language has an eval() function, you are writing in Lisp and you are a Lisp programmer now. Embrace it!
All joking aside, I do think Python is pretty handy.
Re: Python's “disappointing” superpowers
#6I maintain Python code bases for a living, and feel that the language has simply been pushed too far. Static typing in Python doesn't give you the advantage of actually static typing and even IDE support is -- well it's not terrible, just not great.
The thing is, once we go through all this static typing exercise in Python, we get no performance advantages, and the whole thing seems bolted on, with worse semantics than most modern typed languages. And yes, it can stifle undeniable advantages a dynamic language like Python can provide.
Python remains a fantastic prototyping and scripting language, but my feeling is that it now handles more than it should.
Re: Python's “disappointing” superpowers
#7> I’m worried that a de-facto move away from dynamic stuff in the Python ecosystem, possibly motivated by those who use Python only because they have to, and just want to make it more like the C# or Java they are comfortable with, could leave us with the very worst of all worlds. It is certainly happening, and I'm not sure Python the language is all the better for it. I say that as a guy who explicitly mentioned this…
Over the years C# (and probably Java, but I'm not so well versed in that) gained quite a few features to improve "Meta-Programming", one could argue in an attempt to compete with dynamic languages. In C# that is mainly possible through introspection, generics and maybe dependency injection. Entity Framework Core can mostly figure out an SQL Table and its queries by looking at a simple class. It's not as good as the Django ORM or SQLAlchemy, but it tries to achieve similar things...
So maybe some stuff in the Dotnet ecosystem got started because Python programmers were forced to use C# and tried to make that more dynamic.
Re: Python's “disappointing” superpowers
#8Is there any language out there that improves on Python in various ways but still allows convenient access to literally the entirety of Python's ecosystem of libraries?
Hy: https://docs.hylang.org/en/stable/
I tend to stick to vanilla python though, mainly because Hy is too much of an hassle for my use cases.
Re: Python's “disappointing” superpowers
#9When I did most of my work in Python, typehints weren't a thing. I still feel like static typechecking is less useful in Python since its datamodel is overally less of a hot mess compared to Javascript for example.
And Python modules/frameworks can be a lot more "typed" than you'd expect. Django models, forms etc offer more runtime validation than typesystems can easily achieve. Yes, at runtime. But between not having a build process and in general being more readable and concise, I feel like Python lets you run into the runtime error long before you get the same thing done "error free" in C#. Not that C# doesn't have runtime errors...
Re: Python's “disappointing” superpowers
#10Is there any language out there that improves on Python in various ways but still allows convenient access to literally the entirety of Python's ecosystem of libraries?
Coconut, F# (Fable)...
https://github.com/vindarel/languages-that-compile-to-python