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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

#251

Post by pea »

guhcampos wrote: post #175
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....)

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 feel like the opposite is also true. People view Java as enterprise Java from 2008; a clunky outdated language for bad, verbose spaghetti code.

In fact, a lot of the most interesting plt and compiler r&d going into real world applications is on the jvm (project loom, graal etc), and the features of modern Java (pattern matching, records, etc) make it a great choice for lots of projects that aren’t legacy enterprise apps.

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

#252

Post by rs186 »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #221
tombert wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had a somewhat unearned distaste for Python for the last decade or so. I mostly just don’t like some of the design decisions it made. I don’t like that lambdas can’t span multiple lines, I don’t like how slow loops are, I don’t like some functions seem to mutate lists and others don’t, and I am sure that there are other things I missed. But it really comes down to the fact that my career hasn’t used it much. I…

why would you want a lambda to span multiple lines? How would that be any better than a function?

If your style is doing a lot of functional programming, multi-line lambda is a very natural thing to do. Other times you want to use a variable or several variables without actually passing it around as an argument. It makes sense especially if you are already used to it in Java/C++/JavaScript/Go.

Is it "better" than a named function? No, of course, they work mostly the same. But we are not talking about better or not. We are talking about syntax just for the sake for syntax, because some people prefer to write code in a way you don't necessarily care about.

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

#253

Post by taeric »

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…

I'm surprised there isn't an argparse like thing for documenting expected environment variables.

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

#254

Post by dzonga »

tombert wrote: post #204
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 gave a talk recently at a conference about how modern Java doesn’t suck very much, and that the worst part of Java is Java developers, who seem to be completely intellectually unambitious. I don’t think Java makes anyone unambitious, I think it’s that Java is taught in schools and unambitious people don’t feel the need to learn anything else, and they get jobs at unambitious corporations. It selection-biases toward…

link to talk please if recorded.

I think one comment I saw here on HN that Java is better if written in Pythonic way. I agree completely with that stance.

but yeah within Java you've 'merchants of complexity' people who wanna do things in the most abstract way rather than the simple way.

btw Java can be as simple as Go.

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

#255

Post by bunderbunder »

deepsun wrote: post #236
bunderbunder wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java shops are certainly where I've witnessed the most disdain for Python. IME the strongest feelings tend to come from people who didn't actually have any significant experience with Python, and perhaps don't even have much practical experience with any language that isn't Java. So they tended to consider it to be objectively inferior purely because it's interpreted and dynamically typed. At a previous job I did man…

I have way more experience with Python than Java. In at least 4 companies (including Google that I wouldn't call a javashop) we used mainly Python. Still I believe Java is a better application language. Python is a better scripting language (replacement for Bash). Small apps tend to be easier on Python, but large apps are way easier on Java, both for syntax (types) and ecosystem (libs).

Mostly agreed, though I would add that I'm generally happier with Python as a default for reasonably sized services that don't have a lot of (non-numpy-friendly) compute load and therefore don't have a pressing need for multithreading. Which is a lot of what happens now that we're all trapped in the cloud. Like you say, small apps tend to be easier in Python.

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

#256

Post by ddejohn »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #167
wiseowise wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bizarre is that you don’t consider it ugly. Kotlin: constructor is either part of class definition or keyword constructor. Ruby: initialize JS: constructor Python: ______new______, _______init_______ Literally this meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/three-headed-dragon

It's like the bright orange garments that hunters wear, the ugliness is sort of the point. It says "this is a different sort of thing."

> It's like the bright orange garments that hunters wear, the ugliness is sort of the point.

Ugliness is not the point of hi-vis vests lol, the point is to not get shot by other hunters.

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

#257

Post by moffkalast »

wiseowise wrote: post #13
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…

Bizarre is that you don’t consider it ugly. Kotlin: constructor is either part of class definition or keyword constructor. Ruby: initialize JS: constructor Python: ______new______, _______init_______ Literally this meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/three-headed-dragon

I would think the dumber thing is having to create an empty file called __init__.py for a package to register as a package. And relative imports being completely fubar.

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

#258

Post by supriyo-biswas »

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…

This is absolutely correct as someone who has worked in a few Java shops. Although, the same thing is Java's failing, as it is well nigh impossible for people external to the Java ecosystem to learn what's inside it without having work-related exposure.

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

#259

Post by RamblingCTO »

est wrote: post #11
smcleod wrote: post #8

Python as a language is nice. Python's version and package management is nothing short of a nightmare.

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

I'll throw in BLAS and LAPACK. Fuck, what a nightmare it always has been to get scipy running. I've always ended up with a wild mix of conda and pip installed shit that just wouldn't work.

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

#260

Post by whatever1 »

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....)

I think during the python 2-> 3 transition period (which was almost a decade long) a lot of people started looking into alternatives, because frankly that mess was the last straw. In the scientific domain this is when Julia started growing.

Of course then crypto bros happened and the rest is history.

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