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Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

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Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#51

Post by wredcoll »

adamddev1 wrote: post #10
echelon wrote: post #4

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.

It would help a lot if every single racket/scheme example wasn't entirely made of single character variables.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#52

Post by superze »

hmokiguess wrote: post #34

Python is awful. There are so many one offs in libraries, none agree on a style, it’s slow, and it’s way too easy to do the wrong thing. I often work with data scientists and have to productionize their jupyter notebooks which is pure suboptimal hell. I guess it must be a good easy learning curve for research/scratchpad

C'mon man, I don't know any mid and above python developer who seriously has ever considered programming in Jupiter Notebooks. Python is not slow, it's you being the issue. If you are an amateur then it's easy to do the wrong thing, that's true.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#53

Post by wildzzz »

Lucasoato wrote: post #22

Wow, I wish to understand the internal details of Python implementation that makes it behave in such a way :)

I don't. I have no interest in trying to assign a value to something that's built-in and not meant to be written to. Like who fucking cares that the boolean constants are actually weird little structure that sometimes let you mess with them and other times your edits are ignored? Maybe this is helpful for writing an entry for an obfuscated code challenge but I'm not doing weird shit like that with the code I expect to work between various Python versions and implementations, especially when I'm getting paid to do it.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#54

Post by fultonn »

hmokiguess wrote: post #34

Python is awful. There are so many one offs in libraries, none agree on a style, it’s slow, and it’s way too easy to do the wrong thing. I often work with data scientists and have to productionize their jupyter notebooks which is pure suboptimal hell. I guess it must be a good easy learning curve for research/scratchpad

The performance hell thing is also also kind of a virtue, though. The language is awful, so everything that does any amount of compute is FFI'd into third party libraries (numpy, torch, sympy, etc). Those libraries are for the most part pretty well designed... or, at least, keep you in a few pretty well-constrained patterns that are easy enough to translate.

If you've ever read through FORTRAN code from a mathematics department or MATLAB/C/C++ from (non-software) engineering disciplines, then you probably understand why productionizing a jupyter notebook is definitely not the worst of all possible worlds.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#55

Post by pseudosavant »

hmokiguess wrote: post #34

Python is awful. There are so many one offs in libraries, none agree on a style, it’s slow, and it’s way too easy to do the wrong thing. I often work with data scientists and have to productionize their jupyter notebooks which is pure suboptimal hell. I guess it must be a good easy learning curve for research/scratchpad

I've never become a fan of the language syntax, but otherwise I've become quite smitten with the total Python ecosystem. The Agents/LLMs + uv combo have made Python so useful and productive for me.

My CLI tools publish from Github to PyPI so that I can run tools with just `uvx sql-agent-cli` or `uvx dlna-here. Nothing for me to handle downloading (directly myself), no environment to manually setup, portable (Linux, Windows, Mac, ARM, x86). Easy for agents to run from a skill.md file without any other prereq than uv.

Really useful library ecosystem to leverage. No more shell scripts, or TS/JS/PHP backend services. I've even used Python on devices I've built around Raspberry Pi Zero 2 boards.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#56

Post by braiamp »

pseudosavant wrote: post #55
hmokiguess wrote: post #34

Python is awful. There are so many one offs in libraries, none agree on a style, it’s slow, and it’s way too easy to do the wrong thing. I often work with data scientists and have to productionize their jupyter notebooks which is pure suboptimal hell. I guess it must be a good easy learning curve for research/scratchpad

I've never become a fan of the language syntax, but otherwise I've become quite smitten with the total Python ecosystem. The Agents/LLMs + uv combo have made Python so useful and productive for me. My CLI tools publish from Github to PyPI so that I can run tools with just `uvx sql-agent-cli` or `uvx dlna-here. Nothing for me to handle downloading (directly myself), no environment to manually setup, portable (Linux, W…

> No more shell scripts, or TS/JS/PHP backend services

You didn't use Perl before? https://xkcd.com/353/

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#57

Post by [deleted] »

kalenx wrote: post #48
adamddev1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can understand that "advanced" python programs may be difficult to understand for beginners (lots of implicit/hidden behaviors, possibility to change basically everything one should expect, etc). But to _learn_ programming, I really, really don't see how using Haskell would be simpler than Python. Perhaps if you have a specific background (e.g., math), but else python is almost pseudo code already. You'll really ha…

[deleted]

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#58

Post by qurren »

hmokiguess wrote: post #34

Python is awful. There are so many one offs in libraries, none agree on a style, it’s slow, and it’s way too easy to do the wrong thing. I often work with data scientists and have to productionize their jupyter notebooks which is pure suboptimal hell. I guess it must be a good easy learning curve for research/scratchpad

I'm fine with the language. I just hate that you can't do

    import numpy==1.5.4
and the code gets exactly the version it wants.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#59

Post by edparcell »

hmokiguess wrote: post #34

Python is awful. There are so many one offs in libraries, none agree on a style, it’s slow, and it’s way too easy to do the wrong thing. I often work with data scientists and have to productionize their jupyter notebooks which is pure suboptimal hell. I guess it must be a good easy learning curve for research/scratchpad

I used to build quant investment notebooks that had to be deployed in production. Lots of problems with that. Mine were: Notebook cells run out of order, so you often have something that works in a session, but not in a fresh run. Developing against limited datasets, so you fail against things you didn’t know to test for. Small adaptions that have to be made every time the notebook is translated into a code file. We streamlined it by making a graph-structured Computation a first class object that tracked staleness as code or data was updated. Then that class could be directly published, and when failures happened in production, the graph could be serialized with the inputs and intermediate calculation data that caused failure, for investigation in a notebook.

We open sourced the implementation https://github.com/janushendersonassetallocation/loman

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#60

Post by xg15 »

chrisweekly wrote: post #26
xg15 wrote: post #2

Isn't "..." then also behaving like True, False and None, i.e. being a lexical token that rewolves to a hardwired value during parsing?

rewolves? EDIT: ah, "resolves" typo. was v curious about python's mysterious "wolfing" aspects

Yes, sorry, I had typed that on my phone. But yeah, now I want to know more too about python's new type wolfing paradigm.
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