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Why Python keeps growing, explained

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Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#241

Post by li2uR3ce »

benrutter wrote: post #116
pletnes wrote: post #11

Python keeps growing in number of users because it’s easy to get started, has libraries to load basically any data, and to perform any task. It’s frequently the second best language but it’s the second best language for anything. By the time a python programmer has «graduated» to learning a second language, exponential growth has created a bunch of new python programmers, most of which don’t consider themselves progr…

I completely agree - but you say that like it's a bad thing. I work as a developer alongside data scientists, who might have strong knowledge of statistics or machine learning frameworks rather than traditional programming chops. For the most part they don't need to know about concurrency, memory efficiency etc, because they're using a library where those issues have been abstracted away. I think that's what makes py…

> without having to take on a whole bunch of the footguns that would come from working directly in a language like c++ or Rust.

Don't forget the footguns of working with developers who do those things. Ask them to do something simple and you get something complex and expensive after months of back and forth about what is wanted. You're likely to a framework for a one off SQL query.

I hear it being said already, "You're using software developers wrong!" Well, maybe software developers shouldn't be so hard to use?

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#242

Post by osigurdson »

airtag wrote: post #174
CipherThrowaway wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, every engineer has heard this same argument but in favor of all kinds of dubious things such as emailing zip files of source code, not having tests, not having a build system, not doing IaC, not using the type system, etc. I'm sure Rust was the wrong tool for the job in your case but I find this type of get shit done argument unpersuasive in general. It overestimates the value of short-term delivery an…

Totally depends on the business you're in. If you're dealing in areas with short time limits then Python is great, because you can't sell a ticket for a ship that has sailed. And I've seen "the right way" which, again, depending on the business may result in a well designed product that is not what's actually needed (because people are really bad at defining what they want) What's brilliant with Python compared to ot…

It is hard to believe that Python is objectively that much more productive than other languages. I know Python moderately well (with much more real world experience in C#). I like Python very much but I don't think it is significantly more productive than C#.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#244

Post by osigurdson »

rootusrootus wrote: post #211
amelius wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also programmers who are tired of chasing pointers and simply want to get stuff done. E.g. people who once wrote "robust" code in Rust but were "outcompeted" left and right by coworkers who churn out shiny new things at 10x the speed.

My most successful career epiphany was realizing that everyone -- my customers, my boss, etc -- was happier if I shipped code when I thought it was 80% ready. That long tail from 80-100% generates a lot of frustration.

Can you clarify this comment?

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#245

Post by cauthon »

faizshah wrote: post #232
blensor wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to admit that I very often start the python repl to just do some simple calculations. I always have multiple terminals open so instead of opening a calculator I just use python in one of the terminals.

I also use a python repl as an alternative to excel or SQL. I find myself just downloading the data as a CSV and then quickly cooking up some pandas to get a graph or aggregate some stats, it’s just so much quick easier imo.

I’ve migrated to the tidyverse for most of my EDA and plotting - I’ve found dplyr and ggplot to be noticeably more expressive. Pandas always added a ton of friction for me.

It’s still my choice for quick and non-graphical analysis when I’m on a remote.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#246

Post by benrutter »

nindalf wrote: post #209
benrutter wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree - but you say that like it's a bad thing. I work as a developer alongside data scientists, who might have strong knowledge of statistics or machine learning frameworks rather than traditional programming chops. For the most part they don't need to know about concurrency, memory efficiency etc, because they're using a library where those issues have been abstracted away. I think that's what makes py…

> a whole bunch of the footguns Could you expand on this in the context of Rust?

Sure thing! Footguns might be the wrong word, and I know as a low level language Rust is insanely safe, but for a high level developer it's type system is gonna mean spending a lot of time in the compiler figuring out type errors, at least initially. That might not be a traditional footgun, but if you're just trying to, I dunno, build a crud api or something, its gonna nuke your development time.

Please don't read this as "rust is difficult and bad", I definitely don't think it is! But its a low level language, and working with it means dealing with complexity that for some tasks just might not be relevant.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#247

Post by KyeRussell »

Yoric wrote: post #238
awkward wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still live in a world where many outward facing networked applications are written in C. Dynamic languages with safe strings are far from the floor for securable tools.

That is true. However, I hope that these C applications are written by people who are really good at C. I know that some of these Python applications are written by people who discovered the language as they deployed into production.

That’s a measure of programming prowess, not the actual security concern at hand.

If the masterful C developer still insists on using a language that has so many footguns and a weird culture of developers pretending that they’re more capable than they are, then their C mastery could very well’ve not been worth much against someone throwing something together in Python, which will at the very least immediately bypass the vast majority of vulnerabilities found in C code. Plus, my experience with such software is that the sort of higher level vulnerabilities that you’d still see in Python code aren’t ones that the C developer has necessarily dealt with.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#248

Post by dekhn »

DeathArrow wrote: post #136
noirscape wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python's biggest advantages are in my experience: 1. Near zero boilerplate. Python's boilerplate is usually no more than setting up a class and then calling a method. Often you can skip the class and just call it directly. This is probably the biggest strength; to give you an example, my standard test for a languages approachability is "how much work do I need to put in to get a very simple JSON file from a web URL"…

>"how much work do I need to put in to get a very simple JSON file from a web URL" (nothing fancy like POST, just an HTTP GET). With python, a call to urllib.request.urlretrieve and then a call json.loads are all you need. In C# you just have to do this: var things = await httpClient.GetFromJsonAsync >("url");

why would an http client know anything about json? that's a bad code smell.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#249

Post by bg24 »

faizshah wrote: post #232
blensor wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to admit that I very often start the python repl to just do some simple calculations. I always have multiple terminals open so instead of opening a calculator I just use python in one of the terminals.

I also use a python repl as an alternative to excel or SQL. I find myself just downloading the data as a CSV and then quickly cooking up some pandas to get a graph or aggregate some stats, it’s just so much quick easier imo.

Do you reply on any GitHub repo or gist w/ code snippets?

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#250

Post by vgatherps »

kaba0 wrote: post #191
vgatherps wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your OS, the linear algebra libraries themselves, much of the user-facing software that you use (latency sensitive rather than throughput sensitive), image/video encoding/decoding, most of the language runtimes that you use, high volume webservers, high volume data processing (where your data is not already some nice flat list of numbers you're operating on with tensor operations), for some examples. Really, for almo…

How is it in disagreement with parent?

They asked for examples of non-numpy/tf/had use cases and I gave some including my own experience? No disagreement, HPC Python in practice is heavily biased towards numpy and friends
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