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Python 3 can revive Python
41–50 of 242 posts
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#42This isn't intended to be obstreperous, but I'm genuinely curious: How many Python developers are in a position to really care about 2 vs 3? The people I know who use Python, including myself, range from utter beginners to experienced programmers, but are using a relatively small subset of the available libraries, and are just using whichever version we started with. I could translate my code to version 3 in a heartb…
If python 3 hadnt chosen to swap all its internals for unicode this miiiight have been plausible; but as it stands the bizaar 'python X' language subset that runs on both is about as good as it gets unfortunately.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#43One pain point I've really felt recently with Python is in the deploy step. pip installing dependencies with a requirements.txt file seems to be the recommended way, but it's far from easy. Many dependencies (such as PyTables) don't install their own dependencies automatically, so you are left with a fragile one-by-one process for getting library code in place. It was all fine once I got it worked out but it would so…
One of the reasons I've come to do most of my early stage prototyping in node is that managing npm packages has thus proven much easier than finagling with pip or gem.
Ruby installs are especially difficult to manage. Despite the numerous tutorials out there, I still don't know what, if there even is one, the canonically best way to install ruby and necessary gems is. RVM? Install through Brew? Add path to ~/.bashrc?
I say this as someone who likes using command line so much that I've written Caskfiles to automate my deployment to fresh OS X Machines.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Students in my Python classes (who typically come from static, compiled languages) are always asking me how quickly certain operations execute, or how much memory is used. I try to explain to them that obviously Python developers care about these things, and I show them some of the most common pitfalls. But this isn't the first, or even fifth, thing that you think about when you're coding in Python. The key th…
Speed is low on my list as to why I prefer Go over Python. (In fact, Go isn't necessarily fast. It's just that Python is unnecessarily slow.) Having a decent type system and decent concurrency primitives are far more attractive.
I've never found myself wishing for a better type system, although maybe I've just been steeped in the world of dynamic, strongly typed languages for too long.
But there's no doubt that concurrency is indeed one of Python's weak points, and Go's strong points.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can write pretty functional python, though. There are python compilers like Nuitka (I'm sure there is an llvm frontend somewhere...), mobile is kind of a pickle, yeah, I'd say Django is pretty rails but I always use bottle because I've never needed the kitchen sink before, and the reason its not in the browser is not pythons fault. On that topic, I'd spend a day writing cobol or C++98 if I could get QML + Python…
The main problem with functional programming in python is the bizarre neutered version of its lambdas. It really limits the expressiveness of using anonymous functions in python, as compared to, say, JavaScript. It's by far my biggest complaint with what is otherwise one of my favorite languages.
Since you can define a function inside a function, why does it matter that it isn't anonymous?
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#46I only want print as statement again
Seriously? The first thing I do when writing python 2 is import the print_function!
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#47Python is still, by far, the most friendly language for beginners. The single biggest factor in this is the powerful data structures that Python has, especially lists. As so many others have said, Python is almost "executable pseudocode".
Python remains the language of choice for introducing programming because it is so simple. It isn't fast, and it might not be very well suited for large-scale, long-term use. That's okay.
This appeal to beginners, which the article claims is waning, is the vital force of Python; as long as it is the de facto language for beginners, it will never go the way of Perl.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#48This isn't intended to be obstreperous, but I'm genuinely curious: How many Python developers are in a position to really care about 2 vs 3? The people I know who use Python, including myself, range from utter beginners to experienced programmers, but are using a relatively small subset of the available libraries, and are just using whichever version we started with. I could translate my code to version 3 in a heartb…
> Could a single Python interpreter somehow manage a mixture of 2 and 3 code?
You could write code for a subset of 3 that would be fully functional on 2. There are a number of efforts out there to provide the missing compatibility layer that opened a chasm between Python 2 and 3. My contribution is https://github.com/kislyuk/eight.
Depending on what you're doing, writing code that is compatible with even the easiest combination of versions (2.7 and 3.3) can be unreasonably hard, and the officially recommended migration tools suck. IMO this has to do with a few unfortunate design decisions made back in the 2.x days (most egregiously the ascii default encoding and silent Unicode coercion), combined with an unwillingness to admit that 3.0-3.2 were really bad in not providing a migration path and work on a more comprehensive migration strategy and backports library.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#49Python needs to be revived?
I always thought of Python as being a great utility programming language. It's not really a specialist, more of a jack of all trades.
For example PHP is all about web development. Ruby is probably most well known for Rails and also widely used for web development. Python is widely used for web development, but that's not necessarily the first thing you think of for Python.
What's going to keep any programming language alive is the libraries that become so well entrenched that a competing library would have a serious uphill battle to even come close to matching functionality. Python has a lot of libraries like this for scientific tools.
I'm always skeptical to hear that a developer has moved from X programming language to Go. I wonder how many of these tales are from developers who are actually referring to what they do in their spare time rather than their day jobs. Go is still early enough that doing the sorts of things which create the most jobs is still more painful than it needs to be (and so you would probably be doing these things in a different ecosystem.) It seems that the real Go job generating stories are from start-ups which have hit some momentum, received funding and are rewriting parts of their stack in Go.
The mass job generators are still at the Rails / Django / PHP / JS levels.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#50[deleted]