Why I push for Python • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I push for Python

#121

Post by nightski » Sun, May 18, 2014, 9:38 PM UTC

eddiedunn wrote: post #118

nightski wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but hardware, compilation, linking, and algorithms are anything but boring. Even as a beginner I was very intrigued by all of them, even if I did not understand them as well.

Yeah, sorry, but that's you. I can bring my own anecdotal evidence to the table and say that for me, compilation, linking and algorithms were very secondary to the thrill of typing in "commands" to the computer and have it do all the work for me automagically. Programming, which I learned in college, was a very pleasant method of getting around all that boring math by letting me figure out how to solve the problem an…

Thrill does not allow you to solve problems (beyond what a competent engineer has solved for you behind a pretty API). In order to succeed at solving problems you must enjoy it in the first place. If you do not care about the underlying algorithms behind those calculations programming is always going to be boring.

Re: Why I push for Python

#122

Post by CountSessine » Sun, May 18, 2014, 11:06 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #95

zo1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have quite a few muddled definitions that you trip yourself over in your post. First you say that you're an engineer, which means you're an "applied scientist". Then afterwards you go on to claim that computer scientists aren't really "engineers" by your definition. Then further down you go on and say that they're instead "specialists". Sounds like you just had to find another word other than "Engineer" there, so…

>First you say that you're an engineer, which means you're an "applied scientist". I am. >Then afterwards you go on to claim that computer scientists aren't really "engineers" by your definition. They're not. At least, not in Canada. It's against the law to call yourself an engineer if you don't actually hold an engineering degree from an accredited institution. >I can't tell if you're just confused about what all th…

>First you say that you're an engineer, which means you're an "applied scientist".

I am.

I think that's just a ridiculous way of referring to engineering. If we're going to be strict about the term engineer, we might as well be strict about the term scientist and pounce on anyone calling themselves a scientist, applied or otherwise, if they haven't submitted articles for peer review. How many members of your graduating class of applied scientists have been peer reviewed?

They're not. At least, not in Canada. It's against the law to call yourself an engineer if you don't actually hold an engineering degree from an accredited institution.

Protection of the term engineer in Canada, for any old BSE, is ridiculous and is inconsistent with conventions in most of the rest of the developed world. It's largely ignored by industry, frequently 'violated', and protects no one - certainly not the public at large, at least. What really needs protection is the title P.Eng, which actually is important to the safety of the public.

The term Engineer is protected in my country due to very real issues of public safety

P.Eng. yes - but a BSE? Should the full force of law really be brought to bear on someone who might be confused with having earned a BSE by calling themselves an engineer? Who does this protect?

You don't want someone certifying a skyscraper as safe, only to find out they are an architect, not an engineer

Yes - and that would be a licensed, legally entitled, and legally cupable P.Eng., not some random BSE.

Edit - for the uninitiated, P.Eng. or Professional Engineer is a legally protected (in Canada and the United States at least) title given to a graduate of an engineering program who has been through an industry mentoring process, has taken competency exams, and has taken a professional oath of ethics. These are the men and women who keep our bridges from falling down by saying 'no' when someone wants to cut corners or reduce expenses. Many projects, especially in civil engineering, require the sign-off of a P.Eng. A P.Eng. is also legally culpable if they knowingly approve of something that they shouldn't.

A BSE is someone who graduates from an undergraduate engineering program.

Re: Why I push for Python

#123

Post by na85 » Mon, May 19, 2014, 5:24 AM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #122

na85 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First you say that you're an engineer, which means you're an "applied scientist". I am. >Then afterwards you go on to claim that computer scientists aren't really "engineers" by your definition. They're not. At least, not in Canada. It's against the law to call yourself an engineer if you don't actually hold an engineering degree from an accredited institution. >I can't tell if you're just confused about what all th…

>First you say that you're an engineer, which means you're an "applied scientist". I am. I think that's just a ridiculous way of referring to engineering . If we're going to be strict about the term engineer , we might as well be strict about the term scientist and pounce on anyone calling themselves a scientist , applied or otherwise, if they haven't submitted articles for peer review. How many members of your gradu…

>P.Eng. yes - but a BSE? Should the full force of law really be brought to bear on someone who might be confused with having earned a BSE by calling themselves an engineer? Who does this protect?

I think it's pretty obvious that I meant P.Eng but didn't want to get into it for brevity. Not everyone knows the difference.

Sorry you're butthurt.

Re: Why I push for Python

#124

Post by grayclhn » Mon, May 19, 2014, 12:10 PM UTC

MarcScott wrote: post #117

grayclhn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not javascript, but my daughter loves Logo. She's a little younger than 10, so it's still off and on and a lot of parental involvement.

Have you tried import turtle in Python?

I've been meaning to check it out, thanks!

Re: Why I push for Python

#125

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 19, 2014, 4:40 PM UTC

thu wrote: post #45

fearandclothing wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point the author is making is that Python eliminates a lot of overhead in learning fundamental programming concepts. I think it's easier for a beginner to grasp the meaning of something like for i in range(0, 3): than, say, for (int i; i Haskell is also a great language, but not a great choice for beginners, I think, because it adds a lot of overhead in learning basic programming and CS concepts because o…

I don't understand how your "easier for a beginner" example relates to fundamental programming concepts. Are you talking about variable assignments, jumps, control structure, or about syntax ? Again how is "the whole purity thing" an overhead w.r.t. to learning the fundamentals ? If you take your loop example in Python, how does leaking the `i` variable outside the loop's scope (actually there is no such scope) a fun…

[deleted]

Re: Why I push for Python

#126

Post by hueving » Tue, May 20, 2014, 6:24 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #123

CountSessine wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First you say that you're an engineer, which means you're an "applied scientist". I am. I think that's just a ridiculous way of referring to engineering . If we're going to be strict about the term engineer , we might as well be strict about the term scientist and pounce on anyone calling themselves a scientist , applied or otherwise, if they haven't submitted articles for peer review. How many members of your gradu…

>P.Eng. yes - but a BSE? Should the full force of law really be brought to bear on someone who might be confused with having earned a BSE by calling themselves an engineer? Who does this protect? I think it's pretty obvious that I meant P.Eng but didn't want to get into it for brevity. Not everyone knows the difference. Sorry you're butthurt.

>I think it's pretty obvious that I meant P.Eng but didn't want to get into it for brevity.

That's a pretty major thing to omit considering the argument you were trying to make. Keep shifting those goalposts.

>Sorry you're butthurt.

For being an engineer, you're certainly very immature and appear to lack the critical thinking skills required to engage in an argument with valid points.

Re: Why I push for Python

#127

Post by csense » Mon, May 26, 2014, 8:26 AM UTC

jeorgun wrote: post #53

csense wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go Requires curly braces and type declarations. These are easy for beginners to screw up. > Ruby Ruby's syntax makes me want to gouge my eyes out -- it's every bit as bad as Perl. I'm an expert and I hate Ruby. I wouldn't dream of exposing beginning CS students to that crap unless I wanted to convince them to change their major. > Scratch This is a toy language in a toy environment. I don't know the language well e…

I feel like you're placing way too much emphasis on syntax here. From a non-superficial standpoint, you haven't brought up a single thing wrong with Ruby— or Go, aside from explicit typing. The thing about syntax is that, to some extent, it's subjective . You say Ruby syntax is awful? OK. Personally, when I first started programming, I hated Python syntax¹ so much that I called it quits. It wasn't until later, when I…

Sorry for the necro-reply, but here goes.

There are two things about syntax that I think are actually objective. One is that, when beginners read their own source code that isn't working, they often have more of a tendency to read what they intended to write instead of what they actually wrote, especially when it comes to punctuation symbols.

This means that, when the indentation is right, but there's a missing -- or extra -- brace or semicolon, it can be very, very difficult problem for a beginner to even see. It's also possible for a beginner to write a program with many instances of brace/semicolon issues, giving a frustrating (and sometimes bewildering) boatload of syntax errors.

The second problem is that it's difficult to remember the meaning of symbols. This is true not just for beginners, but also for experts learning a new language with different symbols. This means that the number of symbols in a language should be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, where possible, symbols identical to those used in other languages, or in mathematics, should be used. Where a language has novel ideas that don't exist in other languages, those ideas should usually be expressed by keywords, not symbols.

Ruby fails at this. See [1] for an example. I don't mean to pick on this particular project, rather this file is typical of Ruby code. The file contains the following symbols which seem to be used differently from any language I'm familiar with: Less-than sign used in class declaration, use of colons for thing(s) that are neither dictionary literals nor labels, "absolute value" bars in e.g. { |p| p.id }, shift-left operator used in class declaration, question mark used for something besides ternary operator, lines without side effects like "true" and "false" sprinkled throughout the code (is there some "empty operator" that's applied to these lines to give them side effects?).

My point is that neither a beginner, nor an expert in non-Ruby languages, can understand the above code without constantly consulting the documentation for the unfamiliar syntax elements (and good luck figuring out how to search for "meaning of -> operator in Ruby" without knowing what the -> operator is actually called!) Whereas most Python programs read like pseudocode and can be reasonably well interpreted even by someone quite unfamiliar with the language.

Good languages address that problem by limiting the number of symbols, and making the meaning of symbols as simple and intuitive as possible. Ruby fails utterly on both counts.

I think these facts should be simple and obvious to anyone who's ever attempted to learn either Ruby or Python, but I guess this is HN, where an amazing number of people think Ruby is the bees' knees for no reason I can make sense of.

[1] https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/2a8aa7429b6f489acd...

Re: Why I push for Python

#128

Post by anko » Mon, May 26, 2014, 10:14 AM UTC

bjt wrote: post #90

anko wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I don't know why more creativity seems to happen in the ruby ecosystem, but it really does. My preference of ruby over python comes down to elegance and string interpolation operators (ie. not much). But ruby attracts people trying to do interesting things. Some examples; Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, github, Jekyll. I'm noticing similar cutting edge infrastructure/service stuff being written in go by default.

I think Ruby hit its peak at the same time as people were deciding what language to write Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, Jekyll, and Github in, but it's more a coincidence than something inherent in the language that led to those choices. Salt and Ansible, successors to Puppet and Chef, are written in Python. The author of Vagrant is writing his new tools in Go. The buzz and constant churn of new shiny things that I saw in t…

I know I'm late to reply, but i'm interested. What cool stuff is happening in the node.js community. The only thing I can think of that is really cool is meteor.

I think the thing that sucks about node is that javascript sucks. It's really a horrible language, it's just that it's everywhere. It's not the most horrible, but the type coercion, scoping and standard libraries really suck.

When you say salt and ansible are successors to puppet and chef, it sounds like you are saying they are inherently better, but really they just came later.

Out of interest are you saying you don't believe in Paul Graham's language spectrum? Blub paradox and that?

Re: Why I push for Python

#129

Post by jeorgun » Sat, May 31, 2014, 12:45 PM UTC

csense wrote: post #127

jeorgun wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you're placing way too much emphasis on syntax here. From a non-superficial standpoint, you haven't brought up a single thing wrong with Ruby— or Go, aside from explicit typing. The thing about syntax is that, to some extent, it's subjective . You say Ruby syntax is awful? OK. Personally, when I first started programming, I hated Python syntax¹ so much that I called it quits. It wasn't until later, when I…

Sorry for the necro-reply, but here goes. There are two things about syntax that I think are actually objective. One is that, when beginners read their own source code that isn't working, they often have more of a tendency to read what they intended to write instead of what they actually wrote , especially when it comes to punctuation symbols. This means that, when the indentation is right, but there's a missing -- o…

If we're necro-replying…

Thanks for the detailed reply. Those are all good points.

It's worth pointing out that a lot of Ruby's oddities (specifically :symbols, predicate_functions?, and implicit returns) are stolen from various Lisp dialects— which is also true of a lot of significant semantic/cultural differences between Ruby and Python.

So you could argue that the syntax differences are just a surface form of the underlying semantic differences. But that's kind of cheating (except for the implicit returns, which is a straight-up semantic difference). Maybe the better point to draw is that there is a background (Lisp) in which its syntactic quirks make sense. As an expert, the fact that that background is an unusual one is a negative for intuitiveness. But as a beginner, with no backing in Algolesque languages, does it really make that much of a difference?

Of course, none of that gets into the plain syntactic quirks— ->(pointy){lambdas}, {|block|syntax}, and so forth. But every language¹ has some of those— good luck making sense of Python decorators when starting out, or for that matter list comprehensions. Or non-paren-enclosed-tuples. Ruby's are used more heavily, but that seems more like a cultural difference than a syntactic difference— generally Python favors readability ahead of 'elegance', and Ruby vice-versa, which extends to making heavier use of special syntactic forms.

¹Except Lisp dialects, ironically! But even there, `(there are ,still some . peculiarities).