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I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

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Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#111

Post by sylens »

tgv wrote: post #73
pyman wrote: post #45

From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins. It started gaining more traction when Canonical adopted it as the main language for Ubuntu 4.10 in 2004. Then, in 2005, Guido van Rossum was hired by Google to work on Google Cloud. That opened the door for wider adoption in academia, since Python had strong math libraries and integrated well with tools researchers were already usin…

Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses. They all switched to Python, because you have to explain less. I don't think I heard about web servers in Python before 2012. I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly. PHP's popularity isn't really from 2005-2006. It was popular at the end of the 90s, and it looks like JS as much as it looks like a potato.

In my experience AWS also contributes a lot to this. Boto3 is a great library for interacting with AWS services

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#112

Post by timw4mail »

smcleod wrote: post #8

Python as a language is nice. Python's version and package management is nothing short of a nightmare.

It's like the (usually) interpreted equivalent to C/C++. There are lots of 'standard' package management choices.

And it seems like the package resolution is finally local by default, although that requires a 'virtualenv', which seems to be a legacy of the global packaging system.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#113

Post by wiseowise »

tgv wrote: post #73
pyman wrote: post #45

From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins. It started gaining more traction when Canonical adopted it as the main language for Ubuntu 4.10 in 2004. Then, in 2005, Guido van Rossum was hired by Google to work on Google Cloud. That opened the door for wider adoption in academia, since Python had strong math libraries and integrated well with tools researchers were already usin…

Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses. They all switched to Python, because you have to explain less. I don't think I heard about web servers in Python before 2012. I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly. PHP's popularity isn't really from 2005-2006. It was popular at the end of the 90s, and it looks like JS as much as it looks like a potato.

> Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses. They all switched to Python, because you have to explain less.

Nonsense.

> I don't think I heard about web servers in Python before 2012.

More nonsense.

> I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly.

Extreme nonsense.

https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/ruby-has-been-fast-enough-...

And this is when Python was edging Ruby performance wise.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#114

Post by AlexeyBrin »

johnisgood wrote: post #109
AlexeyBrin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because many available LLMs run your Python code in a sandbox, which means less friction for vibe coders. This is false, a lot of non "vibe coders" are using Python for AI because of PyTorch and a many other AI libraries have first class Python support.

How do you know that it is not the reason or not ONE of the reasons? Seems pretty reasonable to me to use ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one supports it. I am pretty sure some people (maybe this individual, too) may be using Python because their scripts can be executed in a sandbox on one of these websites. Heck, if it was as good at Factor or Forth as it is at Python, I would be writing more of them, too. In any case…

I read your initial message, now edited, as this is THE reason. Of course it can be one of the reasons for which the author chose Python.

Also the vibe coding part gave me the impression that you were implying that people that use/chose Python for AI are all vibe coders which is again false. Sorry if I misunderstood you, but this is what I got from your initial message.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#115

Post by franktankbank »

casper14 wrote: post #94
Mawr wrote: post #80

Just a small note on the code in the linked script: API_KEY = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_API_KEY") CHANNEL_ID = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID") if not API_KEY or not CHANNEL_ID: print("Missing YOUTUBE_API_KEY or YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID.") exit(1) Presenting the user with "Missing X OR Y" when there's no reason that OR has to be there massively frustrates the user for the near zero benefit of having one fewer if statemen…

[flagged]

You must be eternally frustrating junior.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#116

Post by dumah »

wiseowise wrote: post #13
reedf1 wrote: post #5

> Python has done a good job of hiding its legacy ugliness (such as __init__, __new__, and similar aberrations), swettening its syntax to accomodate developers with good taste. What exactly is the problem with __init__ or __new__? @dataclass is very nice syntactic sugar, but are we arguing here that having access to initializer/allocator/constructor dunder methods is "legacy ugliness"? This is the core of pythonic bu…

Bizarre is that you don’t consider it ugly. Kotlin: constructor is either part of class definition or keyword constructor. Ruby: initialize JS: constructor Python: ______new______, _______init_______ Literally this meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/three-headed-dragon

I’m not sure why you’re comparing __new__ to constructors in other languages.

Ruby has the same thing but it’s called ‘new’.

Implementing the type of customization (idiomatically) that __new__ provides in Kotlin and JS isn’t any cleaner.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#118

Post by wiseowise »

pyman wrote: post #85
darkstar_16 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days it's less about language wars and more about picking the right tool for the job You should talk to the Java advocates in my company :) The language wars are still around, it's just Java vs the rest now.

One of my colleagues, a retired programmer who spent 20 years at Microsoft, told my students that it used to be Java vs Visual Basic, until Microsoft brought in the big guns, like Anders Hejlsberg. That's when it turned into Java vs .NET, and things really started to heat up :)

Java unequivocally won the war, though.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#119

Post by parentheses »

wiseowise wrote: post #13
reedf1 wrote: post #5

> Python has done a good job of hiding its legacy ugliness (such as __init__, __new__, and similar aberrations), swettening its syntax to accomodate developers with good taste. What exactly is the problem with __init__ or __new__? @dataclass is very nice syntactic sugar, but are we arguing here that having access to initializer/allocator/constructor dunder methods is "legacy ugliness"? This is the core of pythonic bu…

Bizarre is that you don’t consider it ugly. Kotlin: constructor is either part of class definition or keyword constructor. Ruby: initialize JS: constructor Python: ______new______, _______init_______ Literally this meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/three-headed-dragon

That's kind of the point. These methods are never meant to be called directly. They're used to desugar.

I think it's fairly short sighted to criticize these. FWIW, I also did that the first time I wrote Python. Other languages that do similar things provide a useful transparency.

Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

#120

Post by Centigonal »

casper14 wrote: post #94
Mawr wrote: post #80

Just a small note on the code in the linked script: API_KEY = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_API_KEY") CHANNEL_ID = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID") if not API_KEY or not CHANNEL_ID: print("Missing YOUTUBE_API_KEY or YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID.") exit(1) Presenting the user with "Missing X OR Y" when there's no reason that OR has to be there massively frustrates the user for the near zero benefit of having one fewer if statemen…

[flagged]

thoughtful programming tips? on my HN??
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