841–850 of 856 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved Perl. I _loved_ it. It was so much fun. It felt like vim in how you could guess weird corners of the language. But every reason that made it fun is also an actual reason why it's a nightmare unless you are very strict in how its used. Strict on things like whitespace.
Whitespace strictness is the biggest downside of python.
I started programming python in 98. It won because before that, Perl was king. Have you seen perl? Python made a great decision, it was the anti perl. One way to do things, keep the syntax easy and simple. Force whitespace indents. Before python got really "pythonic" It read like pseudo code. As someone that explored Ruby for a bit, Ruby has too much magic. Magic is cool when you're the one casting the spell, but for…
I have come around to dislike forced whitespace. I don't think non-visible characters should be syntactically important, and spaces are thus overloaded by separating both within lines and defining functions. With linters how they are, a traditional semicolon makes things a lot more clean IMO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you choose Go over C#/Java for medium projects? And why not go for the large projects?
> What makes you choose Go over C#/Java for medium projects? Because I said: >> C# and Java are also getting a bit too complicated for my tastes too. I abhor complications. > And why not go for the large projects? Because I said: >> where I work with others, C# and Java seem to hit the sweet spot Yeah yeah, I know it sounds like I am whining (Maybe I am :-), but at least I am complaining about all of them. Java and C…
This is not always true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of complexity that Rust adds is not worth in most scenarios in my opinion. I can think of Rust as something for OS with critical safety or so. Besides that, in real life you end up having C in most of your software, so I am not sure how Rust behaves compared to well-written C++ with all warnings and linters on and using smart pointers. But my hypothesis is that they do not stay very far apart in safety. Th…
> well-written C++ with all warnings and linters on and using smart pointers. But my hypothesis is that they do not stay very far apart in safety. Can C++ compilers + linters reliably detect all misuses of unique_ptr? Because that sounds like a halting-problem kind of problem, and as soon as you can't guarantee memory-safety, you're definitely not in the same ballpark in terms of safety. I mean, memory-unsafety is th…
Is C and assembly the same level of memory safety? Probably yes... but no, it is not in practice.
And C and C++? Yes, in theory, in practice... C++ is safer.
How about Rust? In theory Rust is safer. In practice, you are going to use C libraries here and there, so... in practice not as safe as advertised.
Well-written C++ with -Wall -Werror, -Weverything, -Wextra... that is very safe, including detecting even dangling stuff to some extent (gcc-13). If you stick to `shared_ptr` and `unique_ptr` no matter how much you complain about it: Rust with its C shims and C++ with all linters and a good environment are practically at similar levels of safety.
This is the practical, real thing that happens. I do use C++ for every day use for around 14 years professionally and 20 years in total.
You are all in the terrain of theory, but how much Rust and C++ have you really written?
Of course, the CVEs data about memory safety, well, those are true. And they are a real problem. But with a reasonably good use of C++ those would be much, much, much lower than they have been so far.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But Python is -dramatically- better focused, as a community, on finding a Pythonic way to proceed, and then advocating it, than previous cultures. I would revise that to be that the pythonic culture of one acceptable way to to is better matched with a lot of good development practices. Perl was also very good at finding a Perl way to proceed. It's just that with Perl that often mean a lot of implicitness and "do wh…
But Ruby took all the best bits of Perl so I'm still perplexed as to why Python "won".
Looking at the hip n cool languages, not just Python for scripting but surely Go and to some extent Rust as well for native stuff (Dart for scripting also but it didn't outright "win"), these are mostly languages that deliberately simplified things. Yes, even Rust - it needs to be compared to C++ and its biggest feature is basically that it doesn't let you do all the things C++ does, within a very similar model.
The only language that I heard is going against these trends (but I'm largely clueless what it's actually like) is Julia which sort of has its own "lay" niche like Perl did back in the day, and is mostly winning based on the premise that it's a performant scientific language.
The industry obsesses over costs of adoption, stability, maintenance; in short: how to get the most out of the least actual new development. It does make quite a lot of sense, to be honest, although sometimes it's really demotivating at an individual level.
And frankly, "learn the language, duh" usually comes up when the language is complex or unintuitive for no practical purpose. Of course there will be people who always complain if they have to learn anything but I don't think they make the majority, or even a significant minority, in the software engineering world. "Learning the language" is only as much of a virtue as the language itself serves its purpose, which includes easy of use and the readability of someone else's code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You see tooling in a different view than typical Python users. Python users see things like iPython, notebooks, the ability to quickly do statistics and plot results, as tooling - to do their jobs. Data Science. Machine learning. Things that perplex and confound static-typing OOP purists. So yes, by your world view - Python is a mess. There's no one way to do things, there's no one tool, no one linter, no one formatt…
> You see tooling in a different view than typical Python users. That doesn't surprise me. I do what you mentioned with F# in Polyglot Notebooks (which support several languages in the same notebook) and Elixir in Livebook all the time, both of which are superior notebook implementations to the outdated Python Jupyter notebooks. My worldview is not driven by comparing Python to C#, Java, C++, and other such ilk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen Python in action since 2010 plenty of times, including the present. It's been a mess every time. My worldview is driven by F# and Elixir, namely the `dotnet` and `mix` tooling, respectively. So no, Python's tooling does not impress me in the slightest. The first thing you need to do is get agreement on all the different checkers, linters, formatters. For Elixir, there's one tool for each task. My worldvie…
You see tooling in a different view than typical Python users. Python users see things like iPython, notebooks, the ability to quickly do statistics and plot results, as tooling - to do their jobs. Data Science. Machine learning. Things that perplex and confound static-typing OOP purists. So yes, by your world view - Python is a mess. There's no one way to do things, there's no one tool, no one linter, no one formatt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Julia has a hard uphill battle against the "Python is the second best language for anything" effect. Julia looks pretty cool to me, but I already know Python. I'll probably learn more about it in my spare time, but I'm also never going to be able to convince my coworkers to try it out, because they also know Python and that's good enough for them. And thus Python's dominance continues.
I was able to convince my coworkers to stop working on a Python project (a simulator for a scientific instrument) once we all realised that we would have not been able to keep using plain Python because of performance. When the alternatives where (1) to force everybody to learn either C or Fortran, or (2) to rewrite everything in Julia, they asked me to provide examples of both solutions. After I showed them a few di…
Someday I'll do a project in Julia. But for some such projects, Rust seems fully guaranteed to be performant while Julia might or might not be, so I might still lean towards Rust (unless one of the high quality packages of Julia removes a lot of development time, which is a decent possibility).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was able to convince my coworkers to stop working on a Python project (a simulator for a scientific instrument) once we all realised that we would have not been able to keep using plain Python because of performance. When the alternatives where (1) to force everybody to learn either C or Fortran, or (2) to rewrite everything in Julia, they asked me to provide examples of both solutions. After I showed them a few di…
Did you evaluate Cython? I'm not anti-Julia, but I like that my Cython code is useable out of the box from Python, with no wrapping, and then users can continue to use their Jupiter + Python scripting workflows with performant bespoke modules complemented by the full Python ecosystem. Someday I'll do a project in Julia. But for some such projects, Rust seems fully guaranteed to be performant while Julia might or migh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved Perl. I _loved_ it. It was so much fun. It felt like vim in how you could guess weird corners of the language. But every reason that made it fun is also an actual reason why it's a nightmare unless you are very strict in how its used. Strict on things like whitespace.
Whitespace strictness is the biggest downside of python.
The only annoyance is when copy-and-pasting code from one place to another, the indentation can get screwed up, which is a small annoyance.
But other than that, this seems like an argument that was settled 20 years ago.