Reminds me of "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett...
You guys really lack a sense of humor and/or easily get offended.
Python 3 can revive Python
221–230 of 242 posts
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I add that Python is excellent at data representation and transformation. You can easily write some test data and just include it in python, then transform it any way you feel you like to get intelligence out of it. With the standard library you can easily load a CSV file you exported form a data-set and then aggregate and evaluate it with only a few lines of code without much language overhead. Schema-less mixed con…
> I add that Python is excellent at data representation and transformation Indeed! It's a very practical extraction and reporting language.
Shame it doesn't have regex syntax built in...
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is: is the Python community OK with it becoming a niche language for scientific computing, or do we want to to keep being used as a general purpose language?
Python is also the modern sysadmin's Perl. This is a huge niche, to the point of not being a niche at all. Just take a look at the number of system tools used in a Redhat install that use python. Coincidentally, Redhat's python tools are one of the major reasons for continuing support of Python 2.
Is it?
I was looking at making a restore from backup script today (tomorrow I will likely implement it). I have been using Python and Django for the last three years almost exclusively. Perl just felt like would more natural fit for the job (with the exception of messing about with dates part).
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm using Python 3.4. All the libraries I need are available, including the world's best database library, SQLAlchemy. It's a more pleasant experience than Python 2.x. And I have the peace of mind knowing that I'm not stuck on a legacy, deprecated platform. I used to stick up for Python 3 on HN and other places but I've given up. I have no interest in converting people going to Go. And no matter what Python (or any o…
I thought I was alone. I also stopped trying to convert people to Python 3. It is a much better language. By this point, it should be obvious. After taking it for a test lap, and after cursing at forgetting parenthesis on print for the hundredth time, you get it. Anyone who uses python and, by this time, hasn't taken python 3 for a test run isn't worth my advocacy time.
You say it is a much better language. I see very little difference between the two.. With the exception of exceptions, and print I think all the changes must be to language features I don't know about / use.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's a question of test runs. For most of us, it's a question of waiting for various libraries to be ported.
How do you know what "most of us" think?
speaks to people, reads forums, participates in conversations like this....
When I have seen people talking about sticking with Python 2, its either because A) why bother I don't need to B) a specific library is not Python 3 yet.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Spot on. Id love to see a bunch of 'I swapped to python 3 and it was amazing because... [reason]' posts. If nothing else It'd illustrate clearly either the python 3 folks haven't got a leg to stand on (unable to come up with any tangible real life [reason]) or that there are actually compelling reasons to swap over to python 3; in which case we can point people to those posts in threads like this. (personally I foray…
I had some bug in a Django library, that went away by using Python 3. Can’t remember what it was exactly, but it was related to Unicode support.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Python and JavaScript is a perfect demonstration of "worse is better". Python 2 is a vastly better language than JS, avoiding nearly all of its design misfeatures and having actually useful built-in types and standard libraries. Yet while Python spent a decade to go from 95 to 99 percent purity, JS took over the world through sheer ubiquity.
So we need to get Python embedded into a couple of major browsers? Edit: Asked on twitter for any work on this: https://twitter.com/alexchamberlain/status/47126815887225241...
There used to be something for Internet Explorer 4 and above. All you had to do was to set the language attribute of the tag to Python. See "Python Programming On Win32: Help for Windows Programmers", page 437 [1].
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#228My perspective is as a researcher in academia. From here Python is far from needing to be revived, it is gaining ground. Also, Python 2 is still king and I suspect will remain popular - researchers rarely have the luxury/incentive to go back and improve it to comply with a language update. A few reasons Python is gaining ground in academia. Firstly, Python is _great_ for teaching undergraduate programming (see [0] fo…
> it has a massive advantage over many other languages: Great documentation and a large community
I want to iterate how important these two factors are.
Python is a joy to get started with because the documentation is very easy to understand, very well organized (search results are almost always relevant), and it includes lots of examples.
The large community takes care of what the documentation lacks. Stack Overflow is loaded with Python knowledge, something I realized I took for granted now that I'm learning Ruby.
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know what "most of us" think?
speaks to people, reads forums, participates in conversations like this.... When I have seen people talking about sticking with Python 2, its either because A) why bother I don't need to B) a specific library is not Python 3 yet.
Selective hearing has not provided the other side of the story. Because it's not true at all that everyone or even a clear majority agrees with the viewpoint you've expressed
Re: Python 3 can revive Python
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to lose track of this in the torrent of "PyPy Benchmarks Show It Sped Up 2x!!!!" and "Latest Javascript Engine 50% Faster Than The Last One!!!! OMG!! Node!!!!", but in absolute terms, the dynamic language JITs are still quite slow. It's an urban legend that they are anywhere near compiled performance. Except LuaJIT. "Faster Python" is still slow . Unless you're in a tight loop adding numbers together, but I…
Personally, barring any major JIT advances, I'm considering the book closed on the topic of whether JITs can take a dynamic language and make it as fast as C or C++. It's possible to close more of the speed gap, but these JITs have to be able to: * identify and use native primitives (avoid overflow and so forth) * prefer stack allocation over heap (improved escape analysis) * inline memory allocation and freeing and…
I think you're fundamentally confused about how computers work. It is always faster to do things in software than in hardware. Naive optimizations are always faster than data flow analysis from profiling. More layers of indirection make things faster, so the fastest languages put interpreters inside of their interpreters. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. The kids are getting smarter.