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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

#211

Post by bunderbunder »

munificent wrote: post #206
guhcampos wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the author used to be a Java person. I have this feeling - or prejudice - that people still in the Java World are a bit out of tune with the tech industry, working on huge legacy projects on big retail or US banking. These people tend to be conservative and resistant to change, so maybe that's where these types of articles are coming from.

I have a related feeling or prejudice that people not in the Java World view their corner as "the tech industry" without realizing that they are living in a village compared to the giant metropolis that is the Java World. Java programmers may not blog as much, and Java doesn't show up on Hacker News as much, but not being Extremely Online does not mean that it isn't extremely widely used by real people whose experien…

If the TIOBE index is an even remotely useful indicator, Python's an even bigger giant metropolis.

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

#212

Post by nottorp »

theshrike79 wrote: post #77
tgv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With python you can just go: 'print "hello, world!"' and that's a full-ass program You run it by saying `python hello.py`. Compare that to the amount of crap you need(ed) with 2005 Java just to have something running. The shittiness of ActivePython and generally getting python to run on Windows were a bit of a hurdle, but still it was easier than the competition

You could, but then they deprecated the paranthesis less form in 3.x :)

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

#213

Post by leptons »

vinceguidry wrote: post #174
jlarocco wrote: post #160

When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination. I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)

There are massive numbers of devs who would never even think of trying to code in a dynamically-typed language, even though the big players all have gradual typing. They don't know what they're missing.

I have no problem with dynamically-typed languages, my main problem with Python is the significant whitespace. I really do not like it. I can deal with everything else in Python, or any other programming language, but significant whitespace is what kills it for me.

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

#214

Post by trchek »

munificent wrote: post #206
guhcampos wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the author used to be a Java person. I have this feeling - or prejudice - that people still in the Java World are a bit out of tune with the tech industry, working on huge legacy projects on big retail or US banking. These people tend to be conservative and resistant to change, so maybe that's where these types of articles are coming from.

I have a related feeling or prejudice that people not in the Java World view their corner as "the tech industry" without realizing that they are living in a village compared to the giant metropolis that is the Java World. Java programmers may not blog as much, and Java doesn't show up on Hacker News as much, but not being Extremely Online does not mean that it isn't extremely widely used by real people whose experien…

You may know all this and are just singling out the Hacker News crowd. But I read your comment and thought "surely he doesn’t think Java is much bigger than Python?" I’m not even sort of sure Python is smaller.

Edit more succinct

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

#215

Post by dec0dedab0de »

munificent wrote: post #206
guhcampos wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the author used to be a Java person. I have this feeling - or prejudice - that people still in the Java World are a bit out of tune with the tech industry, working on huge legacy projects on big retail or US banking. These people tend to be conservative and resistant to change, so maybe that's where these types of articles are coming from.

I have a related feeling or prejudice that people not in the Java World view their corner as "the tech industry" without realizing that they are living in a village compared to the giant metropolis that is the Java World. Java programmers may not blog as much, and Java doesn't show up on Hacker News as much, but not being Extremely Online does not mean that it isn't extremely widely used by real people whose experien…

you could say the same thing about a dozen other languages, but there is definitely a stereotypical cranky java dev that is frustrated writing corporate crud apps that should in theory be blazingly fast, but never quite are for reasons. They revel in the verbosity, and look down on anyone they feel is taking the easy path. If you've never met one you're lucky, but they've been at every company I ever worked for.

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

#216

Post by asa400 »

zeppelin101 wrote: post #184
bootsmann wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel like pipx walked so uv could run, it popularized the idea of abstracting the environment management away from the user.

pipx is still the best tool for standalone utility type of packages: "yt-dlp", "glances" (like htop), etc.

You can, however, use uv for this, e.g., `uvx yt-dlp` works like it would in pipx.

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/tools/

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

#217

Post by polotics »

kelipso wrote: post #200
jlarocco wrote: post #160

When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination. I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)

[flagged]

would be great if you manage to substantiate your "terribly designed" statement. any pointers? :-)

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

#218

Post by PeterStuer »

munificent wrote: post #206
guhcampos wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the author used to be a Java person. I have this feeling - or prejudice - that people still in the Java World are a bit out of tune with the tech industry, working on huge legacy projects on big retail or US banking. These people tend to be conservative and resistant to change, so maybe that's where these types of articles are coming from.

I have a related feeling or prejudice that people not in the Java World view their corner as "the tech industry" without realizing that they are living in a village compared to the giant metropolis that is the Java World. Java programmers may not blog as much, and Java doesn't show up on Hacker News as much, but not being Extremely Online does not mean that it isn't extremely widely used by real people whose experien…

I worked in .Net land before switching to Pythonville. It's very much like Java metropolis, but with less CS graduates.

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

#219

Post by slightwinder »

tyrust wrote: post #172
gvalkov wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I write a decent amount of Python, but find the walrus operator unintuitive. It's a little funky that API_KEY is available outside of the `if`, perhaps because I had first seen the walrus operator in golang, which restricts the scope to the block.

This is just Pythons scoping, which is not restricted by block, but function. You have the same effect with every other element.

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

#220

Post by blurbleblurble »

jlarocco wrote: post #160

When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination. I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)

After using Rust's tooling, Python's tooling is obscenely painful. Like intolerable. Which makes some of us feel overwhelmingly frustrated with the language itself. The amount of time I've squandered on Python because of its tooling... I'm never getting that back.

But then uv came along. It's not just another poetry or pipenv or whatever. It works well and it has uvx and `uv tool install` and other nice things.

Previously when I saw that something was written in Python I'd curse under my breath because I don't have the mental energy to make a virtual environment and source its shell script and remember where I put it just to try something out. On arch Linux I can't just pip install something without going through some crazy setup that I used to have patience for but as I get older it's been better to just curse that snake language altogether and spend time doing something more chill like writing rust.

But now I can just type "uvx" and it works. I'm probably not going to start writing python again any time soon, but at least now I have less reason to be disappointed with people who themselves choose to write Python.

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