Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

sebsite.pw

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 234 posts

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

#71

Post by stouset »

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’ll never not be bitter than Python “won” the scripting language war over Ruby, more or less just because someone did a bit of AI work in it first and it took over that space by default.

Ruby has such a nice holistic consistency to it. With a few exceptions, it feels like it was conceived of by one person with a core idea in mind. Python feels like a mess.

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

#72

Post by fn-mote »

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…

Haskell’s hard to interpret error messages alone disqualify it from being a beginner language.

Python: errors based on incorrect indentation (many beginners don’t use nice IDEs), or don’t understand the meaning of the hints) and scope (don’t forget your “global” if you’re hacking in PyGame) are challenges.

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

#73

Post by Revanche1367 »

A lot of Python design decisions have felt weird and off to me but they’ve long justified it by saying that it’s those little ugly design choices that make the language so usable and effective in practice compared to more well-designed languages that hardly anybody uses. I’m not enough of an expert to clearly say if that’s really true, but imo, there’s a repeated pattern of slightly weirdly designed languages becoming super popular: Python, Javascript, perhaps C as well. Or, maybe we only notice the weirdness because these languages are used so much and get nitpicked to no end.

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

#74

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

plant-ian wrote: post #20
nneonneo wrote: post #12

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.

Ditto. I’ve certainly never used it and can’t recall seeing it in any codebases I’ve worked on or looked at. Sounds interesting though!

I’ve of course certainly heard of, seen, and used `assert`, but more often than not, outside of pytest, I see its use way more in potential footgun scenarios—I doubt that many people know that assertions can be silenced, and that they’d probably be better off raising exceptions in many cases where they’re using `assert`.

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

#75

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

Vexs wrote: post #29
plant-ian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see asserts used in production code as part of flow control way too frequently, so I assume the majority of python users aren't aware of the -O flag, much less this behavior- which I too haven't ever heard of. Of recently, I've noticed claude is a big fan of asserts too.

Yep. I’ve had to tell Claude to basically not use assert. Thankfully it’s very complaint in this one area.

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

#76

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

wildzzz wrote: post #53
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 t…

Please. Such a charged response wasn’t justified at all. Different people are curious about different things. You ask “who fucking cares?”. The answer? You don’t, and the person you’re replying to does.

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

#77

Post by frollogaston »

Revanche1367 wrote: post #73

A lot of Python design decisions have felt weird and off to me but they’ve long justified it by saying that it’s those little ugly design choices that make the language so usable and effective in practice compared to more well-designed languages that hardly anybody uses. I’m not enough of an expert to clearly say if that’s really true, but imo, there’s a repeated pattern of slightly weirdly designed languages becomin…

JS is a lot less weird than Python. And Python is what I started with and continue to use half the time. The article missed the most common one, __name__ == "__main__" like wtf

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

#78

Post by fn-mote »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #27
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.

> Racket / Scheme / I dare say even Haskell would just be so much simpler for learners. 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…

> Quickly intelligible if you learned something else like Java or C++

You’re replying to a post making assertions about beginners.

That doesn’t usually mean people with 4 years programming experience picking up a new language.

Racket: criticizing for having a beginner-friendly IDE doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s always Magic Racket for VSCode for the others.

I guess you’re not starting people with “How to Design Programs” because that’s pictures and animations for ages.

Haskell: that was funny but an absurd criticism ghc vs ghci?? Nobody has that problem. The other stuff - valid but lead with it instead of trolling.

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

#79

Post by Revanche1367 »

stouset wrote: post #71
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’ll never not be bitter than Python “won” the scripting language war over Ruby, more or less just because someone did a bit of AI work in it first and it took over that space by default. Ruby has such a nice holistic consistency to it. With a few exceptions, it feels like it was conceived of by one person with a core idea in mind. Python feels like a mess.

Long before AI work, numerical data crunching is what Python became popular for among non-computer scientists and this led directly to the AI use cases. The reason was obviously the lower barrier to entry without having a software engineering background. I also share with you that feeling about Ruby in particular.

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

#80

Post by frollogaston »

stouset wrote: post #71
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’ll never not be bitter than Python “won” the scripting language war over Ruby, more or less just because someone did a bit of AI work in it first and it took over that space by default. Ruby has such a nice holistic consistency to it. With a few exceptions, it feels like it was conceived of by one person with a core idea in mind. Python feels like a mess.

Python's strength is that it's easy to make C libs work in it. That's also why CPython is de facto the only Python implementation and stuff like PyPy never took off.
Post reply on HN