Homogenization of scientific computing – Python is eating other languages’ lunch

Post by ufmace » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 9:58 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #32

area51org wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Post by dded » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:04 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #103

fit2rule wrote: post #33

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 ..

For me, Tcl does what Lua does, but much better. In fact given Tcl, it's hard to see why Lua was created.

Post by yohanatan » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:17 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #118

yohanatan wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that's not 'highly proficient'. This is: def read_words(words_file): return [word for line in open(words_file, 'r') for word in line.split()] len(set(read_words('test.txt')))

GP asked for counts, not uniques.

    words = open("test.txt").read().split()
    [(k, len(list(g))) for k, g in groupby(words, lambda x: x)]

Post by wyager » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:22 PM UTC

benhoyt wrote: post #95

tokipin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

python is a deliberately-straightforward language. i don't see how anyone couldn't become highly proficient in it after writing one or two scripts

Deliberately-straightforward -- agreed. But "highly proficient" after writing one or two scripts? That's quite a stretch. For instance, one of the questions I give in phone screens is for the candidate to write a program to count the number of occurrences of unique words in a text file. The "after writing one or two Python scripts" approach is something like this: counts = {} f = open('test.txt') lines = f.read().spl…

    lines = [line for line in open("bible.txt")]
    words = [word for line in lines for word in line.split()]
    counts = {word:0 for word in words}
    for word in words:
        counts[word] += 1

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 10:27 PM UTC

klibertp wrote: post #67

simias wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think all the modes for python in Emacs implement dedent and indent functions which behave nicely. I hacked one of them to leave selection active after the operation and now - it's still more than one command - I do C-y for paste, C-x C-x to select what was pasted and C-M-> or C-M- On the other hand it's almost impossible to make a mistake with indentation with python-mode (and similar, I'm using all-in-one-plus-yo…