51–60 of 184 posts
I know that I use python because of how easy it is to code. I can focus wholly, totally on the logic of my code without ever worrying about if I misplaced a semi-colon or left out some weird punctuation. Python frees me to code and not worry about things that get in the way of coding. That's why it's eating other language's lunches, the freedom is almost intoxicating.
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Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor (and don't do something like mix spaces and tabs, which I think everyone is in general agreement with across all languages). When was the last time that you manually typed out 4 (or 2, or 8, etc) spaces to indent a line of code vs. just hitting tab and letting the editor handle inserting those spaces (or the editor automatical…
> Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor (and don't do something like mix spaces and tabs, which I think everyone is in general agreement with across all languages). Nope. Tabs are for indentation and spaces are for alignment. It's precisely because of non-good (or maybe non-smart) editors that people can't be bothered acknowledging or practicing this distinction a…
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Even inside of scientific computing, the picture is quite a bit more nuanced. This post is basically about a the author's personal migration to Python as a user of other people's scientific programming packages. In doing interviews with people inside of companies, there's fairly little actual use of Python for scientific computing – lots of Python for data preparation, but R and Matlab (not to mention Simulink) still…
Literally every single C programmer in the world is writing x86 or arm machine code. C programmers have this bizarre blind spot where they don't realize that though. Isn't that weird?
I know that I use python because of how easy it is to code. I can focus wholly, totally on the logic of my code without ever worrying about if I misplaced a semi-colon or left out some weird punctuation. Python frees me to code and not worry about things that get in the way of coding. That's why it's eating other language's lunches, the freedom is almost intoxicating.
It's ironic that you say that, given that if you don't get the whitespace correct, you'll have a syntax error. That's one of the big reason Python rubs me the wrong way: white space is semantic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor (and don't do something like mix spaces and tabs, which I think everyone is in general agreement with across all languages). When was the last time that you manually typed out 4 (or 2, or 8, etc) spaces to indent a line of code vs. just hitting tab and letting the editor handle inserting those spaces (or the editor automatical…
> Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor (and don't do something like mix spaces and tabs, which I think everyone is in general agreement with across all languages). Nope. Tabs are for indentation and spaces are for alignment. It's precisely because of non-good (or maybe non-smart) editors that people can't be bothered acknowledging or practicing this distinction a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor (and don't do something like mix spaces and tabs, which I think everyone is in general agreement with across all languages). When was the last time that you manually typed out 4 (or 2, or 8, etc) spaces to indent a line of code vs. just hitting tab and letting the editor handle inserting those spaces (or the editor automatical…
> Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor I never understood that. The whole problem for me is that the indentation being the only thing denoting blocks the editor can't know for sure how things should be indented, since it's not simply cosmetic. I haven't written a whole lot of Python but how do you even refactor python code? In C I can just copy paste a block of c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor (and don't do something like mix spaces and tabs, which I think everyone is in general agreement with across all languages). When was the last time that you manually typed out 4 (or 2, or 8, etc) spaces to indent a line of code vs. just hitting tab and letting the editor handle inserting those spaces (or the editor automatical…
> Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor I never understood that. The whole problem for me is that the indentation being the only thing denoting blocks the editor can't know for sure how things should be indented, since it's not simply cosmetic. I haven't written a whole lot of Python but how do you even refactor python code? In C I can just copy paste a block of c…
That is just one of the many issues that can come up when refactoring large sections of code, and is one reason that people write tests. For people to point it out as the entire reason that they can't use Python seems to be making a mountain out of a mole hill.
For example, I don't like that I can't use "if $?" in Ruby and I need to explicitly write "if $? != 0", but I don't go around bashing Ruby on that basis. For some reason people feel that need to do that with Python though. I don't really understand it.
I find Lua more interesting than Python. It has all the simplicity, all of the power, none of the indentation, and is quite a nice portable tool. That said, I do wonder at times what it is about Lua that makes so many people not-interested in it, when .. from my naive point of view .. its an almost perfect language for rapid development. I don't have that feeling about Python, quite so much ..
+1 I'm a user of both, fan of both, but the lightness of Lua is a big plus. The main downside, IMO, is that the Lua user base is smaller so there's more need to roll your own solutions for things that Python already has several libraries for.
I find Lua more interesting than Python. It has all the simplicity, all of the power, none of the indentation, and is quite a nice portable tool. That said, I do wonder at times what it is about Lua that makes so many people not-interested in it, when .. from my naive point of view .. its an almost perfect language for rapid development. I don't have that feeling about Python, quite so much ..
I love, love, love Lua. I use it for everything. That being said, there's a lot I'd like to use it for that I can't. I'm not a great programmer by a longshot, I'm a hacker in the most traditional of senses (ie, not a hacker who builds billion-dollar wildly successful startups. I write one-off programs to solve a need or to automate a task). Lua doesn't have a lot of features. This is great because it's small and simp…
I know that I use python because of how easy it is to code. I can focus wholly, totally on the logic of my code without ever worrying about if I misplaced a semi-colon or left out some weird punctuation. Python frees me to code and not worry about things that get in the way of coding. That's why it's eating other language's lunches, the freedom is almost intoxicating.