Python's static typing still feels very very clunky and bolted on, and tooling around it was rather bad, like mypy. In general I definitely wouldn't say python tooling was good. It's improving rapidly with ruff tho, just as JavaScript when esbuild appeared.
Dumb question: I know the built-in typing (import typing) is limited in some ways, but it works pretty fine to cover most basic needs. So what does mypy add? I'm super interested in adding typing to some code we have but I'm just a bit confused by the choices available. Would mypy with pydantic be a good combination or do they overlap?
The two are complementary: the built-in `typing` module only provides type annotations, not type checking. Mypy provides the latter, via the type annotations that you (and others) add to Python codebases.
Pydantic overlaps with mypy in the sense that it provides a mypy plugin, but otherwise it's just like any other Python library.
Matlab has a more interesting dispatch model than python though. (Mathematica has even better dispatch but I haven't used it in almost 20 years at this point) Julia's model is even better, but I just never have time to dig into it deeply enough to get to the zen of Julia. One day when I have time to understand Julia I'd like to, but it's hard to compete with the reliability of python just always working.
What is dispatch in this context? Function call polymorphism? Aside: I wasn't a big fan of the Mathematica language so I wrote "PyML" a looooong time ago- it turned unevaluated Python expressions into Mathematica, transmitted them via MathLink to be evaluated the Mathematica kernel, and then the results were send back and converted to a Python expression. This was long before sympy. It never went anywhere (I found wa…
Yes, function call polymorphism. Especially combined with Mathematica's piecewise syntax. I didn't really use it for numerics, it was more for Lisp/Prolog type things. I was always impressed at how short and readable the Mathematica code ended up being. I used to use Mathematica quite a bit to generate C++ functions.
But it's a very different use case than Matlab. One of the things I like about python is it isn't too bad for sliding between lispy/functional modes for some things and more lapacky things elsewhere. Matlab has a better syntax for the lapack parts but trying to do anything functional gets really annoying and very, very slow. But still I would say Mathematica has the best pure math syntax for those sorts of things. I don't have any experience with sympy, I should probably check it out.
Only one of the items in your "such as" list is unique to python's philosophy, and that is "there should be one way to do it". Ruby embraces the many ways to accomplish something, it's true. However, the three others are not unique to python. Ruby especially embraces "readability counts". And I can't think of anything in the ruby language itself that is implicit over explicit. Perhaps you are thinking of rails and co…
For me, the Ruby community's comfort with monkey patching was a big turn off. In Python, you can hack around on class and replace its methods, but if you do, it's expected that your coworkers might stick you in a dunk tank and sell tickets. It's just not the thing that's done.
Whereas in Ruby you get to go to a conf for doing that.
Python ended up 'specializing' in data contexts, thanks to Numpy / Pandas, and as a result, ended up becoming the first exposure to programming than anyone doing data stuff had. That was millions of people. In that space, it had no competitors. Ruby ended up 'specializing' in web dev, because of Rails. But when Node and React came out, Ruby on Rails had to compete with Nodejs + React / MERN as a way of building a web…
It’s not because of data science, it’s popular for the same reason Java is popular, it’s what they teach in schools. It’s a virtuous cycle, industry adoption grows school adoption which grows industry adoption…
Being taught in schools is helpful, but not sufficient on its own, or we'd see more professional Forth, Prolog and Scheme programmers
Around 2010, I recall that a lot of computer science departments in the US made a switch from using Java to using Python as the first language to teach programming concepts. So a large number of students were exposed that way.
Also, a number of top-tier websites (YouTube, Instagram, Dropbox, Netflix) made Python a central part of their stacks.
I've been writing code since the mid-90's, probably in a dozen languages or so over that timespan. In my experience, Python is "easy" -- as in, you can quickly achieve what you want. It doesn't get in your way with opinions about types or data structures. You can rapidly create horrific kludges that produce the results you want. Not sure I'd say it's a programmer's language. It's like javascript that way, but without…
I believe what you describe is basically a preference for a language you already know. I'm quite proficient in JavaScript and could repeat everything you say about ... JavaScript. OTOH I had to do things in Python a bunch of times, and it was always very frustrating.
The JavaScript ecosystem is objectively smaller. JavaScript doesn’t have a foothold in data science and ETL, nor deep learning, nor DevOps. There are no decent ORMs in JS, and Python has several. JS is poor for numerical and scientific programming.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned I'll throw out the Rails/Merb split in the late 00s as a significant momentum killer for Rails (and, by extension, Ruby). Rails 3 reunified them but I don't feel like it ever fully recovered it's developer mindshare, and the timing was such that it really opened the door for rivals like Express (Node) and Django (Python) to gain traction.
I really wanted to love Python. As a Ruby programmer I thought Python would be like Ruby, but with a prettier syntax because of the syntactic white space. Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case. Here's my gripes with Python as a Ruby developer that really wanted to love Python: There's a bunch of global functions that should have been methods on objects, like `len()`. OO in general seems slapped on later, a…
I agree with the objective observations, but subjectively I prefer Python. Python's OO does feel slapped on. As a Python user I've come to see object-oriented code as just some syntax to organize data and functions. To me, it's all functions, always has been. I'm curious to know if you have similar thoughts biased towards objects? Do you view functional code as just a way of creating and organizing object-like concep…
I think Ruby has a super interesting middle ground. It’s strictly OOP in that everything is an object or a method (or a block), but because of implicit method calls (no parens), implicit return values, ease of use creating anonymous blocks passed to methods, and meta programming allowing dynamic control flow (i.e. calling a method by name at runtime), it has a lot of the elegance of writing functional code. You end up with small, unit-testable, methods that you can chain together, concise syntax, and meta programming that is second only to Lisp macros. It feels a little bit like if you asked a functional programmer to design an OOP language.