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Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

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Re: Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

#21

Post by marcelr »

bmitc wrote: post #4

Does Python or van Rossum really have anything interesting to say on the future of programming? Python has libraries and lots of users and hype, and those are really its only outstanding "features". Python really does nothing interesting when I think of pushing the boundaries of programming.

As someone who tries to design & implements languages on my own time I’ve learned 1 really important thing.

Features don’t make a language good or important. Its the invisible broth the features live in that make them useful. The cohesive nature of python is something few languages can touch. The features in python though not always innovative by themselves work together like magic.

Most people stuck in the initial hype phase of FP often miss these things, but python is special & shouldn’t be discarded because its lack of hyped features of the day.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

#22

Post by philippejara »

tcmb wrote: post #9
doix wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth pointing out that Python is 30ish years old at this point. It's "outstanding features" were creating a syntax that a lot of people can quickly grok (not just programmers) and the way they allowed for extensions to be written in C. I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things", in stark contrast with Perl; "there's more than one way to skin a cat". It's easy…

> I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things" It's one of the principles from the Zen of Python: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python#Principles I agree with your comment, all of these taken together were a medium-sized revolution at the time. It's not for nothing that Python is the most popular language for teaching programming nowadays.

I'm not sure they did to be honest. If I had to choose something to attribute the success of python to the general non-programmers i'd say jupyter notebooks are an order of magnitude more important than any of those things mentioned.

Especially when the idea of there being one obvious way of doing things is contradicted in probably the most used package of pandas, and even built in things like list comprehensions vs loops vs itertools, then couple that with the way it does variable passing.

Can't really agree that it is easier to read for laymen than other c-like languages of its day either, with the use of underscores for class methods and indentation defining scope.

Honestly if I wanted to really know why python was successful interviews with the authors of the notebook, pandas and the AI libraries would be my targets, cause in my view they're the ones that made the language a success.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

#23

Post by bmitc »

philippejara wrote: post #22
tcmb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things" It's one of the principles from the Zen of Python: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python#Principles I agree with your comment, all of these taken together were a medium-sized revolution at the time. It's not for nothing that Python is the most popular language for teaching programming nowadays.

I'm not sure they did to be honest. If I had to choose something to attribute the success of python to the general non-programmers i'd say jupyter notebooks are an order of magnitude more important than any of those things mentioned. Especially when the idea of there being one obvious way of doing things is contradicted in probably the most used package of pandas, and even built in things like list comprehensions vs…

> If I had to choose something to attribute the success of python to the general non-programmers i'd say jupyter notebooks are an order of magnitude more important than any of those things mentioned.

Even then, Elixir notebooks with Livebook and F# notebooks with .NET Interactive (which are actually polyglot notebooks with several languages that can share data) are ahead of plain old Python notebooks.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

#24

Post by bmitc »

marcelr wrote: post #21
bmitc wrote: post #4

Does Python or van Rossum really have anything interesting to say on the future of programming? Python has libraries and lots of users and hype, and those are really its only outstanding "features". Python really does nothing interesting when I think of pushing the boundaries of programming.

As someone who tries to design & implements languages on my own time I’ve learned 1 really important thing. Features don’t make a language good or important. Its the invisible broth the features live in that make them useful. The cohesive nature of python is something few languages can touch. The features in python though not always innovative by themselves work together like magic. Most people stuck in the initial h…

> The cohesive nature of python is something few languages can touch.

I am not sure I follow that at all. I have not known Python to be cohesive, like at all. Just look at how to do async/concurrency in Python. (a) you can't really, and (b) there are several ways to do with all sorts of quirks.

> Most people stuck in the initial hype phase of FP often miss these things, but python is special & shouldn’t be discarded because its lack of hyped features of the day.

People saying this usually just equate functional programming with Haskell. I know van Rossum does because he has said so himself. Functional-first programming, on the other hand, is a totally different ballgame. There isn't a hype phase there because such languages, like F# sit, in about the sweetest spot you can for programming languages. Also, the features Python lacks were around for at least a decade before it. It's not like they're just now the soup of the day.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

#25

Post by ivansavz »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

anybody got a tl;dw?

Some nice historical context for many of the recent developments (e.g. why py3.11 is 30% faster), and other general topics (e.g. why certain languages denote variables using dollar signs).

You can look at the topic-shortcuts on the video timeline to see if any of these topics are of interest to you.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

#26

Post by europeanguy »

remram wrote: post #15
neilmock wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python did introduce more love, kindness, and empathy into the world.

Did it? At this point what it's famous for is the 2-to-3 drama and the 20 competing packaging tools and standards.

Maybe the person you're responding to were taking a sarcastic shot at lex's schtick of making everything about love and empathy.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

#27

Post by imiric »

tcmb wrote: post #9
doix wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth pointing out that Python is 30ish years old at this point. It's "outstanding features" were creating a syntax that a lot of people can quickly grok (not just programmers) and the way they allowed for extensions to be written in C. I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things", in stark contrast with Perl; "there's more than one way to skin a cat". It's easy…

> I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things" It's one of the principles from the Zen of Python: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python#Principles I agree with your comment, all of these taken together were a medium-sized revolution at the time. It's not for nothing that Python is the most popular language for teaching programming nowadays.

The Zen of Python is not much more than a meme. As a nearby comment pointed out, Python doesn't follow it in many ways (explicit vs. implicit comes to mind), and it contradicts itself in several places.

"Readability counts" might be the one exception, at least early on in the language's lifetime. Nowadays it could be argued that even that is diminishing.

But readability is often overlooked by most programming languages, which is a mistake. Programmers (should) spend more time reading than writing code, so it's very important. It's also very difficult to get right, being so subjective, but GvR has a good eye for it, and he made good design choices to balance it with expressiveness.

Readability is also crucial for a language being welcoming to newcomers, and new programmers in general. I think that Python is still the best first language for people learning to program. This is likely the biggest reason for its adoption and popularity today.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

#29

Post by valcron1000 »

doix wrote: post #8
bmitc wrote: post #4

Does Python or van Rossum really have anything interesting to say on the future of programming? Python has libraries and lots of users and hype, and those are really its only outstanding "features". Python really does nothing interesting when I think of pushing the boundaries of programming.

It's worth pointing out that Python is 30ish years old at this point. It's "outstanding features" were creating a syntax that a lot of people can quickly grok (not just programmers) and the way they allowed for extensions to be written in C. I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things", in stark contrast with Perl; "there's more than one way to skin a cat". It's easy…

Haskell is also a 30 year old language and I think it has a lot more to say about the future of programming than Python

Re: Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast

#30

Post by revskill »

Yes, due to the "there is only one obvious way to do things", all Python programmers i know in my country don't know anything about function programming (they use global variables and mutation everywhere), no interface design, the code is almost unreadable (lenghthly mutated code everywhere), inheritance everywhere (there's no way to track back the parent call without debugging), no need for unit test, don't even say about Typing,...

I don't blame Python for such issues, i know it's human error. But why no such issues happen in other languages ?

More beginners into programming is a good thing. But the worst things happen when they don't know a better way to do things. Because "There's only one Python way to do things".

That's the reason i avoid Python at all cost to teach programming to newscomers.

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