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

Python 3 can revive Python

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 242 posts

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#51

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

pekk wrote: post #5

The idea that people move from Python specifically to Go is one of those chestnuts of conventional wisdom that never receives any kind of backing in actual data. If you think that Python and Go are made for the same tasks then you're really confused.

> The idea that people move from Python specifically to Go is one of those chestnuts of conventional wisdom that never receives any kind of backing in actual data.

A big reason for this is that some prominent members of the Python community left for Go and that Go talks have started appearing at Python conferences.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#53

Post by ekianjo »

enneff wrote: post #39
reuven wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

> It's just that Python is unnecessarily slow.

It's not Python that's slow, it's CPython. If you use PyPy you get a much faster implementation of Python, not too far from Go speed.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#54

Post by rdtsc »

gexla wrote: post #49

Python 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…

> I'm always skeptical to hear that a developer has moved from X programming language to Go.

I see what you mean. Also, presumably those that didn't switch, that use and love Python, are not very compelled to write a "We are still staying with Python" blog.

And I think they should. Marketing and perception is important.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#55

Post by SoftwareMaven »

chrishenn wrote: post #8

One 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…

There is work going on in the python packaging SIG to make installing better. One of the big additions for pip is the ability to install pre-built wheels for those "hard to build" packages. There is also work happening on a new package metadata standard.

Unfortunately, that's all I've learned from lurking on the mailing list for a couple weeks.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#56

Post by pak »

L_Rahman wrote: post #43
chrishenn wrote: post #8

One 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?…

> 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.

Wait, what? On production, install the exact ruby you need from your favorite package manager. On your dev box, install any rubies you need through rbenv [1]. Put all your gem dependencies into a Gemfile [2]. On either end, bundle install [--deployment] and call it a day.

[1]: https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv

[2]: http://bundler.io/v1.6/gemfile.html

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#57

Post by SoftwareMaven »

peter-row wrote: post #3

Python 3 isn't really good. It's not really bad, either. There's really not that many magic bullets (other than proper functional programming, maybe, which isn't about to happen in Python). People are leaving Python for Go because people have always left Python for fast compiled languages. Google ditched Python for C++ and Java. Java! I've seen a lot of projects get re-written in Java from Python, but no-one worried…

other than proper functional programming, maybe, which isn't about to happen in Python

If we could just have tail call optimization, I think we could make the rest work (well, maybe better lambdas, too).

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#58

Post by agentultra »

http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/

Wow... that was 2006. Everything I've read in the PEP and mailing lists seems to imply that the contributors were doing their best to limit the scope of the backwards-incompatible changes to those parts that were deemed absolutely necessary.

The point wasn't to break backwards compatibility to add new, competitive features. It was to make the incremental improvements to the language while strategically correcting some poor, historical decisions. In other words it wasn't a rewrite or a new language.

That there are still prominent, influential Python programmers who are complaining about the bytes object is a shame. However it's a battle that is slowly coming to an end.

The real problem is that the community has been dragging its feet and many frustrated developers are complaining loudly and publicly about it. It's distorting what Python 3 is.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#59

Post by SoftwareMaven »

dorfsmay wrote: post #45
thinkpad20 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Having done a lot of python and JavaScript, all I can say is it does matter. It is an extra redirect as you try to find out what is happening as part of a callback (repeated over and over). It is also additional cognitive load as you now need to mentally parse the function's name (which you don't actually care about) and the function's purpose. Finally, it is more time consuming.

I really like coding in python, but the weak-sauce lambdas are on of my least favorite things about it. I would like tail call optimization, but living without it doesn't bother me on a daily basis. Lame lambdas do bother me on a daily basis.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#60

Post by darkseas »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #52
dorfsmay wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? The first thing I do when writing python 2 is import the print_function!

Out of curiosity: why?

I use

    map(print, list_of_tuples)
quite a bit, but that possibly an artifact of my print-based debugging. I can only do this with print as a function rather than a statement, and the single line makes it easy to drop in or comment out as needed.
Post reply on HN