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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

#361

Post by [deleted] »

timkpaine wrote: post #294
simonw wrote: post #287

> I would like to have a tool that generates the project structure for me, but I haven’t found one that fits me yet. I recommend cookiecutter for this. I have a few templates I've built with that which I use frequently: python-lib: https://github.com/simonw/python-lib click-app: https://github.com/simonw/click-app datasette-plugin: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-plugin llm-plugin: https://github.com/simonw/llm-p…

Copier is the new hotness for this https://copier.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

[deleted]

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

#362

Post by tombert »

ActorNightly wrote: post #353
tombert wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>how modern Java doesn’t suck very much, Given fact that Lombok is still pretty much widely used, with its under the hood functionality of essentially hacking the AST, or the fact that annotation processors write out Java code to files, or the fact that you could be using a standard library like Log4j and have a massive vulnerability on your system because someone decided that it would be a good idea if log statement…

That gets to my point though. For example, Lombok isn't really necessary for a lot of stuff now, because Records give you a lot of what you would use with Lombok.

Kotlin and Groovy did come and address problems with Java, you should use use them if your employer allows it. I'm just saying that Java 21 is actually kind of fun to write.

Yes, some of the libraries have been unsafe, but that's one example of the 30 years of Java.

I just feel like Java has improved in the last twenty years. It's the engineers that haven't.

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

#363

Post by MintPaw »

ActorNightly wrote: post #308
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…

No and no. I don't know how you even get to this level of "making it harder for yourself". Say you want to use a specific version of python that is not available on Ubuntu. 1. Install build dependencies https://devguide.python.org/getting-started/setup-building/#... 2. Download whichever Python source version you want, https://www.python.org/downloads/source/ . Extract it with tar 3. run ./configure --enable-optimiza…

> making it harder for yourself

Looking at just the first link, looks way more complicated than venv. And I'm a C++ developer, imagine someone who less experienced, or even who just isn't familiar with C toolchains.

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

#364

Post by nikisweeting »

t43562 wrote: post #68
nikisweeting wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wheels, conda, docker, firecracker, unikernel, flatpak

flatpak, docker ? i.e. include an almost complete distribution just to make one package work? but what if you want that package to work in the distribution you have now? What if you need 2 different packages that are in different flatpacks or different docker images?

obviously don't try those first I'm just saying there's a stack of options to work with for any level of isolation you desire.

start with wheels if you just want pre-built binaries, move up to conda if you need arch and OS-specific C libs that depend on system packages, flatpack or docker if you dont want those to mess up your host, or unikernel/firecracker/VMs if you need kernel modules or hardware virtualization.

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

#365

Post by alexjplant »

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.

> They all switched to Python, because you have to explain less

I think this could be generalized to ergonomics. Java 1.6 is an absolute nightmare for a newb compared to Python. No top-level statements, explicit typing, boxing, verbose declaration syntax, long import statements, curly braces everywhere... and, most importantly, no out-of-the-box REPL. Java has since made strides and borrowed from Kotlin and Lombok but my understanding is that it was too little too late.

Depending upon preference and application one might consider ~half of these things anti-features at the expense of stability but it speaks volumes to why people join and stay in a software ecosystem. If I had to work on a Python project again I'd use mise with uv and viciously lint the codebase down to a reasonable fully-typed subset of the language devoid of custom decorator magic and dunder abuse.

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

#366

Post by Night_Thastus »

miguel_martin wrote: post #354
Night_Thastus wrote: post #150

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 somet…

Python debugging is great when you're strictly debugging Python code. Placing a `breakpoint` or spinning up an IPython instance to investigate the issue via `import IPython; IPython.embed()` makes life breezy. For neovim, you can send code to the ipython REPL easily via vim-slime. I've never found myself debugging the underlying C++ code unless developing a C++ extension. But is it really that hard? Just point lldb t…

Both the C++ and Python are mine. I have cases of both C++ calling Python, and Python calling C++. Problems could be on either side.

The problem is how to step into one from the other, you really can't as far as I know.

The python parts aren't standalone enough that it could just be run on its own, there's so much setup involved prior to that point that it can really only be run from the top-level user controls.

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

#367

Post by adammarples »

whinvik wrote: post #271

Out of curiosity, why would I use Dataclass vs a Pydantic Basemodel. If we did not have a PyDantic dependency I could imagine wanting to use Dataclass. But if I have it, why not use everywhere?

The Chad answer is to use pydantic.dataclass

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

#368

Post by zero_shift »

ActorNightly wrote: post #340
dmz73 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what I am doing wrong but nothing written in Python has ever worked for me. I download the .py repo from from github or wherever and try to run it - errors. I try to install missing libraries pip this and that - errors. I battle fixing endless error with dependencies and when the .py finally runs - errors - wrong version of whatever library or wrong patch of this or that or the "production ready" .py doe…

can you give at least one example? You are probably just expecting too much. No manual checkout/install process is easy as installing an application.

What about Go?

"go install github.com/org/repo/x"

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

#369

Post by afiodorov »

whinvik wrote: post #271

Out of curiosity, why would I use Dataclass vs a Pydantic Basemodel. If we did not have a PyDantic dependency I could imagine wanting to use Dataclass. But if I have it, why not use everywhere?

My rule of the thumb is that Dataclasses are for compile-time type-checking, pydantic classes are for run time type checking.

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

#370

Post by leptons »

daedrdev wrote: post #335
leptons wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

do you mean requirement of whitespace or how much space that takes up? Because you can change how many spaces python needs for its indentation to get some reduction in whitespace

I've been writing code for 40+ years. I know how to set up my editor, thanks.

If you copy and paste some Python code and it isn't indented properly, it breaks the python program. It's the stupidest thing I've seen in any language, including javascript (which isn't as stupid as many claim it is).

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