Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio] • Hacker News Board

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#141

Post by camel_Snake » Thu, Feb 23, 2017, 9:39 PM UTC

steinuil wrote: post #27

Rapzid wrote: post #5

I've recently had to start writing python professionally and I'm not super impressed. My previous python experience was writing small services and fixing others code. Now that I'm working on larger "apps" it feels like a 90's language with all the rough edges and warts. I'd rather being working in a language with better language services and tooling, but python has numpy and all these data viz libraries so whatcha go…

I had to work with Python a few times in the past year and I really have to agree. The lack of proper lambdas, closures, its reliance on mutable data structures and imperative idioms, and the useless distinction between statements and expressions makes it feel like somebody was trying to write a modern language but for some reason stopped halfway. For example: you can't assign the result of an "if" statement. Why? Be…

I personally really dislike nested comprehensions and prefer to just chain with generators like so:

    classes = (student.current_classes() for student in students)
    good_grades = [c.grade for grade in classes if grade > 3.0]

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#142

Post by vosper » Thu, Feb 23, 2017, 9:48 PM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #102

vosper wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pycharm tries really hard to paper over the lack of static typing in Python. Variable/function refactoring works mostly, code completion is acceptable (especially if you're inside a specially supported-framework like Django) and sometimes it'll show up a type error before your tests fail, saving you the time it takes up setup the test db, run the tests etc... I love Pycharm, and I think people who go without IDE supp…

>Pycharm tries really hard to paper over the lack of static typing in Python. It does and IMO this is the wrong approach. I usually fire off a test and use that the push the code to the line I'm interested in, at which point I fire up IPython.embed(). That gives you perfect code completion, instant variable inspection (including instant docstring and code lookup) and the ability to execute and inspect on the fly. You…

That sounds interesting, do you have any details (blog post, tutorial) on exactly how to do that?

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#143

Post by xapata » Thu, Feb 23, 2017, 10:37 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #46

StavrosK wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why defining a function and calling it right after? Documentation.

You could have named closures, so that's hardly a valid reason.

We prefer to have only one obvious way to do it. The more good techniques in existence, the less there's a clear sense of "Pythonic".

It's just a preference. Many tasks have more than one obvious way. But if you're asking to add a new feature, you should explain why it's worth the downside of adding yet another way to do it.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#144

Post by mianos » Fri, Feb 24, 2017, 5:57 AM UTC

I liked the bit where he said he underestimated the number of people and code using python 2.7. I often hear python 3.X has 99% penetration based on probably the same bogus metrics, like downloads from python.com. Then they go on to talk about how many exciting changes are being made to python 3. Some of us actually have work to do.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#145

Post by dagw » Fri, Feb 24, 2017, 8:16 AM UTC

fnord123 wrote: post #114

dagw wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't what the process on Windows these days 1) Go to visualstudio.com 2) click Downloads if you want the full IDE: 3) choose between downloading free version of a trial of the professional version if you just want the command line tools 3) scroll down until you find C++ Build Tools and download that 4) double click the file you just downloaded. 5) Done

No more reboots?

Not that I can recall, at least not on Windows 10.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#146

Post by breatheoften » Fri, Feb 24, 2017, 3:35 PM UTC

lunchladydoris wrote: post #103

breatheoften wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't anything good about matplotlib that I can see. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to see what's nice about it -- but as someone who has to learn it rather than already indoctrinated into matlab style plotting -- it seems like a disaster ... I switched to bokeh and am so far much happier

Did you use something before Bokeh that you preferred, or is your comment based on Bokeh being generally better than Matplotlib?

I should clarify that my experience is pretty narrow in the python space. The comment was based on my (recent) experiences in the land of jupyter notebooks -- first using matplotlib and then switching to bokeh and finding the api to be more straightforward.

Re: Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

#147

Post by mkesper » Fri, Feb 24, 2017, 8:03 PM UTC

Franciscouzo wrote: post #136

mkesper wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's high time to change that default. I'm glad django will not support Python2 after 2020, making clear it's legacy.

There's a reason the python command points to Python 2: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/#id16 It is anticipated that there will eventually come a time where the third party ecosystem surrounding Python 3 is sufficiently mature for this recommendation to be updated to suggest that the python symlink refer to python3 rather than python2 .