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Python Is Eating the World

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#201

Post by coleifer »

What stood out to me: online bullying (dressed-up sometimes as concern/outrage) is what led to Guido stepping down.

Python is great, but it will never be perfect. But the outrage stuff, the entitlement stuff, essentially anything that happens on Twitter... Python seems like a victim of it's own success. Once it got popular, it couldn't scale the checks that might have stopped this runaway train of shit-tweets and bickering on the mailing list.

Personally I don't like a lot of the things that have happened in 3 (asyncio, type whispering, fstrings). I can't help but wonder if, again, this is due to becoming too popular too fast. I say that because aesthetically these features seem to go against the Zen of python.

May you never have users, but if you do, may they not have Twitter accounts!

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#202

Post by KirinDave »

j88439h84 wrote: post #163
KirinDave wrote: post #93

Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious... I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future…

Stop using flake8. The original PEP 8 document doesn't even recommend 80 characters anymore. Pylint and mypy and black are way more useful.

I sure do enjoy watching people hyper-fixate on a tiny thing. I'm not sure who you think you're helping by doing this, but it isn't me.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#203

Post by xxxpupugo »

KirinDave wrote: post #93

Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious... I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future…

I don't know why you hate it so much TBH.

It is a language, better than MatLab/R/SPSS, which come before it.

I honestly don't think it is that bad. And they are many people don't care from a programming language perspective, they need to just finish the functionality.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#204

Post by danielbarla »

yawaramin wrote: post #111
KirinDave wrote: post #93

Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious... I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future…

I'm sympathetic that Python is relatively not a great language, but IMHO an 80-character line limit is quite reasonable. It's easier to read on smaller screens, easier to view side-by-side diffs, and tends to force you to break up your code more. That said, this shouldn't be a lint, it should just be enforced by a formatting tool as a format-on-save setting. It just destroys all the wasted arguments about formatting…

I'd also add that while perhaps a bit on the pessimistic side, I tend to view the 80 char rule / limit not as an ancient hardware limitation of monitors, but as a limitation of our eyes and visual processing circuitry. There is a reason why newspapers and well laid-out websites don't have 300 char width lines. Those are physically harder to read, whether we want to admit it or not, as our eyes lose track of the flow to the next line.

I'm all for decreasing unnecessary cognitive load, there should be quite enough of that without us adding more by accident.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#205

Post by KirinDave »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #199
KirinDave wrote: post #93

Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious... I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future…

I would rather wish Golang eat the world than Python, just because the practicality of python becomes questionable when performance is key. In my previous startup in India, I trained unskilled personnel to become decent python developers to work on our product; everything was fine till the product grew exponentially and we had to optimise every nook and corner of it to better serve the customers and save on server bi…

Many of my complaints about Python are valid for Go, except that Go makes even more perilous decisions than Python for error handling (and the community kinda gleefully embraces it).

But at least Go is a lot faster and has real concurrency AND parallelism, so it's definitely better than Python.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#206

Post by cs02rm0 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #175
KirinDave wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then may I respectfully submit you or your employer should buy an appropriate monitor or you chould use two. I'm not asking for 300 character lines. A 25% increase would be a rational and sufficient nod to the fact that monitors are bigger.

I work at the same place you do. I code often enough from my macbook, using likely the same tools that you use, and they're truly painful with >80 character lines. I don't understand how Go and Java devs survive. I also don't think an 80 character line limit is a bad thing: small well defined functions that do only one thing are good. Long lines often encourage people to want to nest code deeply (which is terrible!)…

Java dev here. I would try and defend a 120 character limit but I have a 34" 5k widescreen monitor so I probably don't have a leg to stand on.

I'm writing a mix of Java and python at the moment. Python for lambdas behind an API gateway and Java on some containers for stuff that's more complex but evolves more slowly.

It's neither python or Java where I'm really spending my time though. It's CloudFormation, Ansible, Jenkins and stitching the whole system together for CD that's killing me. I feel like programming languages are the easy bit these days.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#207

Post by KirinDave »

xxxpupugo wrote: post #203
KirinDave wrote: post #93

Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious... I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future…

I don't know why you hate it so much TBH. It is a language, better than MatLab/R/SPSS, which come before it. I honestly don't think it is that bad. And they are many people don't care from a programming language perspective, they need to just finish the functionality.

> It is a language, better than MatLab/R/SPSS, which come before it.

I don't think so. I think R is a lot more expressive and not really any harder to read. It might have a steeper learning curve, but it's not so bad that I think that actually matters.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#208

Post by KirinDave »

mikorym wrote: post #169
KirinDave wrote: post #93

Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious... I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future…

Do you think this is at least partly due to one usually being frustrated by your "official" work? Or would you prefer something like Java? I can imagine other people's code in Python frustrating myself, but if it is only my own code base then Python is a rewarding language for me.

It's hypothetical so I can't say for sure, but I did work a lot with the JVM and I used Clojure (and I'd probably use Kotlin now as well) and I didn't feel as burnt out as I do now.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#209

Post by neya »

I am currently writing Python based software for a client on serverless architecture. Honestly, I really feel like myself and a lot of people I know use Python only because it has some useful libraries like Pandas compared to other languages. In addition, the effect of 2.xx and 3.xx fiasco can still be felt during development.

These days, I really wish I could write my stuff in Elixir, but too bad its data science eco-system isn't as strong as python's. In the very least, even Ruby as a fallback is much much better to write code with since its philosophy is drastically different from Python's - "Optimize for programmer happiness (Ruby) vs Fuck the programmer and optimze for computers (Python)".[1]

[1] https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine/

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#210

Post by j88439h84 »

KirinDave wrote: post #202
j88439h84 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using flake8. The original PEP 8 document doesn't even recommend 80 characters anymore. Pylint and mypy and black are way more useful.

I sure do enjoy watching people hyper-fixate on a tiny thing. I'm not sure who you think you're helping by doing this, but it isn't me.

It's the only problem you mentioned, and I inferred from your post that it was really bothering you. That was my thinking anyway.

I see now that you mentioned other issues in other comments.

Anyway I appreciate you sharing your feelings to an evidently unreceptive audience. It's nice to know there are better ecosystems out there waiting when I get a chance to look for my own next step.

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