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I remember reading that in early versions of Python there was no built in True and False. Each user would implement this themselves as True = 1 False = 0 then later these got added to the language. In Python 2 you could still reassign and swap them so that 'if False' was actually true! True, False = False, True Python 3 you could no longer reassign them.
I remember reading that in early versions of Python there was no built in True and False. Each user would implement this themselves as True = 1 False = 0 then later these got added to the language. In Python 2 you could still reassign and swap them so that 'if False' was actually true! True, False = False, True Python 3 you could no longer reassign them.
It is certainly the case that isinstance(True, int) returns True, even today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python certainly has some baggage, especially the typing system (which is still not finished, if you're looking at static typing and so is implemented differently by type checkers) and pip's safety, or lack thereof. But comparing it to PHP or Perl is rhetoric leading you one step too far.
Comparing it with PHP is unfair… to PHP. The amount of hard work that the PHP community has done to advance and keep their language relevant is impressive and admirable, and Python is perhaps the most extreme counterexample there is. The Python community has spent the last 15 years refusing to improve in any meaningful way, or to learn anything from their peers. As someone who used to choose only jobs that would let…
for all the hate js used to get, py is at least a few magnitudes worse.
my opinion ofc. don’t get mad xD
Isn't "..." then also behaving like True, False and None, i.e. being a lexical token that rewolves to a hardwired value during parsing?
I used to like Python in the 2010s when it felt like a breath of fresh air relative to PHP and Perl. Now it feels like a weird PHP itself that is slow, brittle, and dangerous to write code at scale in. The loose typing, potluck standard library, and horrible package manager (insofar as the community does not know how to package code) all feel so dated.
I don't understand how people talk about how Python is "easy to learn for beginners" or "easy to understand." To me it's so hard to remember and follow all the weirdness. Racket / Scheme / I dare say even Haskell would just be so much simpler for learners. I'm with Conal Elliot when he said on Type Theory for All that it is sooo much harder to understand a program in Python.
I have used all three languages; and you clearly have no idea of the notion of usability of a language. So many things contradict this, let me list them off the top of my head
- Getting a running toolchain working: Prexisting (most OSes bundle a Python interpreter) or a package install away for Python. Scheme / Racket is some odd mix of custom IDEs with Dr. in the name, or someone's 20 page essay on how SLIME is the best thing ever. Haskell gets into odd stuff with ghci, cabal, and stack, and all of them are extremely slow.
- Tutorials: Python has a ton of them, they all get you printing to stdout and calculating things in about 10 minutes. Scheme / Racket typically spends multiple chapters navel-gazing about lists, cons, and such. Haskell is actually better in terms of the Hello World stuff, but ghci v/s ghc bites you again; and no one has a clear idea of which one to use.
- Advanced concepts: Python has mainstream but halfhearted OOP; and things like decorators and metaprogramming. Quickly intelligible if you learned something else like Java or C++. Or if you learned shell scripts you can get quite a bit done with just imperative. Racket/Scheme: 3 chapters in and you're still trying to figure out tail recursion. Haskell: Instead of just doing fun things with take and foldl you're being hit with trivia about typeclasses.
just my 2c but py is honestly one of the worst languages and ecosystems i’ve used in my life. for all the hate js used to get, py is at least a few magnitudes worse. my opinion ofc. don’t get mad xD
The __debug__ constant is really weird - any block of code guarded with `if __debug__:` will be entirely omitted from the bytecode under PYTHONOPTIMIZE=1. This and `assert` are the only two examples of real “conditional compilation” in Python. This is also the reason why you cannot assign to __debug__: doing so would make it possible to invalidate the compiler’s assumption about `if __debug__:` statements.
I honestly have never even heard of this constant and I feel like I've been using python for a pretty long time. Although maybe my memory for some things just gets garbage collected if I don't use it enough. Does it actually get used that often in real world code? Seems like it might be kind of risky.