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I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

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Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#131

Post by troad »

pyman wrote: post #45

From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins. It started gaining more traction when Canonical adopted it as the main language for Ubuntu 4.10 in 2004. Then, in 2005, Guido van Rossum was hired by Google to work on Google Cloud. That opened the door for wider adoption in academia, since Python had strong math libraries and integrated well with tools researchers were already usin…

> According to programmers from 20 years ago, they were like religions. Each had its own philosophy and a loyal group of followers crusading online, getting into heated debates, all trying to win over more adopters.

It's very weird reading something you lived through described in these terms, as though it were being described by an anthropologist.

Can't help but wonder what the future will have to say about today.

"In 2025, programmers used 'frameworks' to hang 'apps' from some kind of 'web'. They believed these frameworks gave them magic powers. Many even fought in 'flame wars' on this topic, which experts believe involved the use of fire to destroy webs woven by competing programmers."

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#132

Post by kemayo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #18
reedf1 wrote: post #5

> Python has done a good job of hiding its legacy ugliness (such as __init__, __new__, and similar aberrations), swettening its syntax to accomodate developers with good taste. What exactly is the problem with __init__ or __new__? @dataclass is very nice syntactic sugar, but are we arguing here that having access to initializer/allocator/constructor dunder methods is "legacy ugliness"? This is the core of pythonic bu…

Probably the system of giving special meaning to what are otherwise ordinary identifiers. __ isn't a reserved keyword in Python or anything. But there's a set of conventions you're supposed to follow when naming methods and attributes, and they're visibly artificial. It would be cleaner to make the features that are a special part of the language definition also a special part of the language syntax instead of runnin…

Funnily enough, just starting your class method/variable name with __ does do magic things as a pseudo-keyword. Specifically, it mangles the name for callers outside of that class -- `self.__foo` would need to be accessed as `obj._ClassName__foo`. It's python's approach to having private methods, while remaining somewhat ideologically opposed to them existing.

This doesn't apply to the dunder methods, though. They're magically exempt from this magical mangling, so you could call them directly if you wanted. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> You don't think the Python way is worse?

They seem about equivalent? I don't see any real reason to pick one or the other, beyond personal preferences.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#133

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"And guess what's the de facto programming language for AI? Yep, that sneaky one."

Is this referring at all to to PyTorch. If not, any guesses what the author has in mind

"Not only because the syntax is more human-friendly, but also because the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros."

Is this referring to GNU/Linux.

UNIX (UNIX-like) includes more than Linux; some UNIX distributions do not include Python in the base system

Where it is left as choice to the user whether to install it

I know this because I use such distributions and, unless some software needs it, I do not install Python

In such case, when I am done using that software I uninstall it^1

For example, he mentions retrieving YouTube channel metadata

I do not use Python for this; I use a 19-line shell script (ash not bash), its startup time is faster

Unlike Python, it is included in the base system of the UNIX distributions (both Linux and BSD) that I use

But if I need to test something using yt-dlp, then I might temporarily install Python

1. I compile Python from source and one annoying aspect of the project , in addition to the slow startup time, is their failure to include an uninstall target in their Makefile

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#136

Post by gvalkov »

Mawr wrote: post #80

Just a small note on the code in the linked script: API_KEY = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_API_KEY") CHANNEL_ID = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID") if not API_KEY or not CHANNEL_ID: print("Missing YOUTUBE_API_KEY or YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID.") exit(1) Presenting the user with "Missing X OR Y" when there's no reason that OR has to be there massively frustrates the user for the near zero benefit of having one fewer if statemen…

This is nitpicking, but this is a good usecase for the := operator:

  if not (API_KEY := os.getenv("API_KEY")):
      ...
For internal tools I just let os.environ["API_KEY"] raise a KeyError. It's descriptive enough.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#137

Post by runjake »

tgv wrote: post #73
pyman wrote: post #45

From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins. It started gaining more traction when Canonical adopted it as the main language for Ubuntu 4.10 in 2004. Then, in 2005, Guido van Rossum was hired by Google to work on Google Cloud. That opened the door for wider adoption in academia, since Python had strong math libraries and integrated well with tools researchers were already usin…

Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses. They all switched to Python, because you have to explain less. I don't think I heard about web servers in Python before 2012. I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly. PHP's popularity isn't really from 2005-2006. It was popular at the end of the 90s, and it looks like JS as much as it looks like a potato.

1. Python was pretty popular well before entry-level programming courses adopted it. I think they adopted Python because it was a good general purpose scripting language, multiplatform, easy to install and get going, that taught programming concepts in a more approachable way for beginners.

2. Python on web servers was a thing long before 2012. You had Zope in 1998 or so, and it was pretty popular for a while, and hugely influential to subsequent web frameworks. Django came out in about 2005. TurboGears, Pylons in about 2005 or so. Flask in 2010... and these are just the more popular frameworks.

3. I think the author meant that PHP was also vaguely C-like in syntax, like JS. Keyword: vaguely. You had a common way of declaring stuff with curly braces and semi-colons.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#138

Post by Orygin »

t43562 wrote: post #40
est wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python's package management is OK. The main culprit is .so libraries Think JNI or cgo management.

Yes, I've never really understood the complaint about python packaging - building native code is not something that is ever easy to guarantee across multiple distributions and operating systems. Those native packages can be in any language and require any odd combination of tools to build. Who has truly solved that problem?

If you don't need to link C lib, you can build any combination of arch and OS for a golang program. The default tooling allows you to do so easily.

If you need to link a C lib, there are ways to set it up to compile other OS (and maybe other archs).

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#139

Post by freehorse »

fiedzia wrote: post #103
NoboruWataya wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that magic method names generally all follow the same form so it's obvious that they are magic methods and not intended to be part of the public API. Whether that form uses double underscores or something else doesn't really matter to me as they are not being called directly.

> it's obvious that they are magic methods and not intended to be part of the public API Is there an alternative API? No. This is public API regardless of anyone's intentions. Though "it's weird" is really not a very strong argument against it.

There are private and public methods. Private methods are only supposed to be called within other methods, as in privately. Public methods are the ones that are normally called through the code, repl, by the user or whatever. You are not supposed to write `myclass.__add__(x)` anywhere except where you define the class itself and its methods.
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