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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

#141

Post by wpm »

CoolCold wrote: post #55

> Not only because the syntax is more human-friendly, but also because the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros That's kind of very optimistic evaluation - literally anything beyond "import json" will likely lead you into the abyss of virtual envs. Running something created with say Python 3.13.x on Ubuntu 22.04 or even 24.04 (LTSs) / Rocky 9 and the whole can of worms opened. things like vir…

I have a silly theory that I only half joke about that docker/containers wouldn't've ever taken off as fast as it did if it didn't solve the horrible python dependency hell so well. You know something is bad when fancy chrooting is the only ergonomic way of shipping something that works.

My first taste of Python was as a sysadmin, back in 2012 or so, installing a service written in Python on a server. The dependency hell, the stupid venv commands, all this absolute pain just to get a goddamn webserver running, good lord. It turned me off of Python for over a decade. Almost any time I saw it I just turned and walked away, not interested, no thanks. The times I didn't, I walked right back into that pile of bullshit and remembered why I normally avoided it. The way `brew` handles it on macOS is also immensely frustrating, breaking basic pip install commands, installing libraries as commands but in ways that make them not available to other python scripts, what a goddamn disaster.

And no, I really have no clue what I'm talking about, because as someone starting out this has been so utterly stupid and bewildering that I just move on to more productive, pleasant work with a mental note of "maybe when Python gets their shit together I'll revisit it".

However, uv has, at least for my beginner and cynical eyes, swept away most of the bullshit for me. At least superficially, in the little toy projects I am starting to do in Python (precisely because its such a nicer experience), it sweeps away most of the horrid bullshit. `uv init`, `uv add`, `uv run`. And it just works*.

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

#142

Post by Twirrim »

casper14 wrote: post #94
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…

[flagged]

Glad I'm not working with you if you consider that kind of PR comment to be worthy of a negative comment.

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

#143

Post by bodge5000 »

bborud wrote: post #47
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hasn't really been true for a while now. `uv` has radically improved the experience.

For the last 20 years that has been the mantra. Some X "solves" all the problems. Except it doesn't. It just creates another X that is popular for a while, and doesn't somehow retroactively "fix" all the chaotic projects that are a nightmare to install and upgrade. Yes, I understand people like Python. Yes, I understand the LLM bros love it. But in a real production environment, for real applications, you still want…

I can get that Pythons not for everyone, it certainly has its flaws and maybe uv is just another transient solution which will come and go and others have. I might disagree, but I can accept that. What I can't accept is the idea that it should be avoided for real production environments, which is frankly a bit ridiculous considering all the real applications and real production environments running on Python.

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

#144

Post by runjake »

I really don't find the Python language elegant at all. I prefer the Ruby syntax.

But Python's tooling, particularly with what Astral is doing (uv, ruff, ty), is so good, I'm always using Python and virtually never using Ruby. And yeah, the rich libraries, too.

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

#145

Post by eurekin »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #37
eurekin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at a java shop. All customer facing apps are in java. Our tools and glue code is mostly in python. Similar for data processing workflows

Yes that might demonstrate the point. Would Python be your second choice for the customer facing apps?

Unfortunately, might not be easy in practice. It took years of effort to pass some certifications and audits and I don't think adding another language could be recouped now

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

#147

Post by Twirrim »

brabel wrote: post #79
timeon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate bit what is the problem here? Is it shape of the characters or something else?

Amazing. If you need to ask this question I am guessing you have spent too long with Python . No other language uses this underscore madness for special methods or otherwise. Because it’s just , I don’t know a more appropriate word for it , stupid.

What's actually amazing is how you're unable to answer a straight question.

If you call something "stupid" it doesn't really convey anything meaningful, especially not in the way you're using there, it comes across as "I don't actually have a reason I don't like it, I just don't".

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

#148

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses.

No, entry-level courses were in a mix of Scheme, C, and other languages until Java’s industrial ubiquity ended up in it becoming a popular choice, but not completely displacing the others. Then as Python (along with the broader class of dynamic OO scripting languages) became quite popular, Python got added to the mix, but, unlike Java, it fairly quickly displaced not only Java but a lot of what had been around longer in introductory courses.

Python’s industrial success drove its initial use in introductory courses, but doesn't fully explain it, as it doing what Java never did indicates.

I think the people teaching introductory courses find it less of a compromise to industrial popularity than they did with Java.

Python’s success is multifaceted, some of it is right-place right-time, a lot of it is the ecosystem it built because of that, but a lot of it is, I think, that it turns out to be a language that has been designed (both initially and in how it is been managed over time) to be a very good language for real people solving real problems, despite not adhering to any of what various typing and performance and paradigm purists like to posit as the essential features of a good language.

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

#150

Post by Night_Thastus »

I love writing Python. However, there are caveats:

1: I don't like dealing with language crossing boundaries with it - it's painful, especially if to/from a compiled language - there's just too much friction. It's easy to write but hard to maintain.

2: Debugging python can be...painful. If you have a pure perfect environment dedicated to pure python and all the tooling set up, it can be breezy. But if you have something messier like C++ that calls Python or vice-versa and are using an editor not made for Python like QTCreator then suddenly it becomes hell.

Who owns this data!? Where was this initialized!? What calls this function!? What type is this data!?!?!?!? These questions are so effortless in C++ for me and so very painful in Python. It slows efforts to a crawl.

It feels exhausting to have to go back to print statements, grep, and hand-drawing a graph that shows what functions call what just to figure out WTF went wrong. It's painful to a degree that I avoid it as much as possible.

...and don't even get me started on dealing with dependency problems in deployments...

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