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Why Python is Important for You

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Re: Why Python is Important for You

#81

Post by masklinn »

jshen wrote: post #72
masklinn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. They're not comparable, so no. > I think JRuby is more mature than jpython Pretty different situations, from 2006 to 2009 two lead JRuby developers were hired specifically for that by Sun (later left for EngineYard) and a third was hired by ThoughtWorks for the same. For Jython this only happened in 2008, after the project had pretty much gone on freeze due to the original founder leav…

You dodged the first two issues. Python 3 is causing serious pain, does django work with it yet? Second, who cares why JRuby is more mature, it is.

> You dodged the first two issues.

No (and screw you for your unwarranted downvote you ass)

> Python 3 is causing serious pain, does django work with it yet?

I did not deny that, I denied your equation of Python 3 with Ruby 1.9 when they have absolutely nothing in common and had very different goals.

> Second, who cares why JRuby is more mature, it is.

That's not the issue with your question, the issue is that you cherrypick a single alternative implementation which supports whatever claim you're trying to make and ignore all others. That makes your claim both dishonest and irrelevant.

IronPython is more mature than IronRuby, Pypy is more mature than Rubinius, by your comment that makes 2 for 1 therefore Python is superior to Ruby right? That's nonsense, because your original assertion is nonsense.

But hey, at the end of the day I couldn't expect much more from somebody who decided to turn a discussion on relative merits into a dick-size contest. I guess the western ruby community has not matured as much as I thought it did. Thanks for bringing me back to reality.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#82

Post by jshen »

masklinn wrote: post #81
jshen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You dodged the first two issues. Python 3 is causing serious pain, does django work with it yet? Second, who cares why JRuby is more mature, it is.

> You dodged the first two issues. No (and screw you for your unwarranted downvote you ass) > Python 3 is causing serious pain, does django work with it yet? I did not deny that, I denied your equation of Python 3 with Ruby 1.9 when they have absolutely nothing in common and had very different goals. > Second, who cares why JRuby is more mature, it is. That's not the issue with your question, the issue is that you ch…

I didn't down vote you, it seems HN doesn't allow me to down vote on threads I'm participating in. If it did, I'd down vote your last comment.

I think the JVM is the more significant platform compared to the clr and rubinius/pypy. Therefore I think it's maturity is more significant.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#83

Post by maxerickson »

wcarss wrote: post #45
wging wrote: post #11

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most la…

Ruby's blocks and built in regular-expressions are two examples of things you're missing. if result =~ /regex/ that kind of thing is awesome for readability, but it can also be pretty darn slow. There's also some interesting things about the ruby object model and interpreter that are different from python's approach. Whereas in the python REPL you type help(object) to get the docs on that object, in ruby you type obj…

It sounds like object.public_methods and object.methods are a lot like dir(object) in python.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#84

Post by keypusher »

bugsbunnyak wrote: post #37
keypusher wrote: post #13

I do love Python, but I often wish there was more rigor for some things. I currently work on a large project (>500K LOC) and have started to see it fall apart with a bigger team. Lack of enforced typing in function arguments, inability to create strict interfaces, inconsistency in standard library conventions, and package management would probably be my biggest gripes.

Curious: what is this 500k LOC project (if you can say) and how much of that is Python? If it's an in-house codebase that's a really neat datapoint because it would rank among the largest open-source Python projects.. Also, Traits (from Enthought) is an attempt to deal with some of the issues of typing and interfaces. It's led to some great software (the Chaco plotting package is fantastic, as is Mayavi), but I've ye…

Project is automated testing for an enterprise private cloud platform. 500K of tests and test library is all python, the application itself is probably 2M+ LOC, Java + C running on Linux.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#85

Post by thehotelambush »

wging wrote: post #11

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most la…

I used Python for a really long time and switched to Ruby several months ago. Benefits of Ruby are:

-no distinction between expression and statement (everything has a value)

-lambdas can thus contain any expression

-much bigger range of built-in methods and classes (all permutations of a list, removing duplicates from a list, Rational class, Regexp class, Range class, etc.)

-more flexible syntax and "control operators" like each_with_index

-almost zero distinction between built-in classes and methods and user-written ones: you can open up Hash (dict) or Array (list) and extend it straightforwardly.

Downsides are:

-generally uglier and more ambiguous syntax

-distinction between functions and methods (b/c "all you can do is send a message") leads to a lot of unnecessary duplication of concepts

-so-called "blocks" which are really just a hack to avoid writing the word "lambda" a bunch of times (maybe if the more concise Ruby 1.9 syntax for lambdas had existed earlier blocks wouldn't have been implemented). I think they are based on the idea that most HOFs only require one functional argument, and they encourage functional programming, but they (along with the last bullet point) discourage the general case. They provide some of the functionality of macros.

-you can't define a class inside a method (still haven't quite figured out the reasoning behind this one).

In general Ruby is definitely more powerful than Python, but in its higher ambitions suffers more obviously from clashes between functional and OO programming. Python's dogmatic insistence on "readability" makes it feel like an old grandma in comparison to Ruby.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#86

Post by [deleted] »

masklinn wrote: post #73
Peaker wrote: post #61

"Weirder languages (e.g: Haskell)" sounds like something a Blub programmer would say. How is Haskell "weird"? I've used Python for many years, but only recently have I migrated my last Python niche (simple scripts) from Python to Haskell. I've found that even there, Haskell has become more productive.

> How is Haskell "weird"? Functional the world (of wide-spread computing languages) is imperative, lazy the world is eager, objects-less when the world is object-oriented, curried when the world is uncurried, pattern-matched when the world is conditional and brings up "strange" concepts from mathematical bowels like "monads", "functors" or "zippers" when the world barely iterates on arrays. How is Haskell not weird f…

[deleted]

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#87

Post by 16s »

Game_Ender wrote: post #14
wging wrote: post #11

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most la…

In my opinion Ruby has a slightly more obscure syntax with custom symbols, and it's C API is not as clean and well put together as Python's.

Which is more obscure?

Reverse a string in ruby: string.reverse()

Reverse a string in python: string[::-1]

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#88

Post by thehotelambush »

ak217 wrote: post #3

I like to call this cognitive compatibility - the amount of effort required from an uninitiated English-speaking observer to understand what a program does. Most people who are deeply familiar with a language will have a tendency to discount this effort, but really it is essential because it minimizes the translation layer that your brain has to use any time you read code. Python encourages code which is readable in…

This is the kind of reasoning that lies behind LFMs: that it is better to cater to someone who knows nothing about the language (but maybe has a few mainstream languages under their belt already) than to someone who has put in the work to understand it. I'd rather pay to learn a difficult but more abstract language feature just one time, than pay all the time for its absence.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#89

Post by pranjalv123 »

scott_w wrote: post #57
pranjalv123 wrote: post #22

My biggest problem with Python is that projects larger than a given size tend to become unmaintainable rather quickly. This is in large part because of the lack of strong typing and type annotations; if you aren't the only author or can't keep the codebase in your head, it takes real effort to figure out what a function does. Even the type annotations provided in a language like Java or C++ make this task much easier…

I must respectfully disagree. I work with web-based systems and find the dynamic typing of Python to be its biggest strength. The ability to just throw another property onto an object before sending it to the template-engine saves so much engineering work, it totally overcomes the downsides of not annotating required types. I can see where it may be an issue, but I think the documentation should focus on what functio…

I think the proper way to do this is through the use of interfaces (Java), abstract superclasses (C++), or typeclasses (Haskell, etc.). These give you the benefits of polymorphism, e.g. you can pass anything that implements "read" to a function that processes input in a given way, but also gives you the compile time typechecking that helps you avoid bugs.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#90

Post by cheald »

wging wrote: post #11

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most la…

Ruby is Python's slutty sister. She's just as hot, but she'll let you do things to her that Python would dump you for even trying.
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