251–260 of 554 posts
Making a language more Englishy, does not make that language more readable.
I still have to learn what the hell the syntax is trying to express except the English makes it more verbose.
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Are you after monkey patching, where you can add new methods outside of the class definition? That's not really a standard feature of all object orient languages - Java doesn't do that, for instance. Python integers are definitely objects: (3).real # returns 3 (3).imag # returns 0 Python's lexer/parser made different choices than Ruby's, so the parens are needed here.
In no particular order + Java doesn't promise "everything is an object." It has Base Types. + Python doesn't make a semantic promise that "everything is an object." Code for (3).fizzbuzz => "fizz" probably needs written in C because built-in types are closed and object literals use the built-in types. "3" cannot be forced to use a subclass of Integer. At the bottom, '3' is defined in terms of Types (i.e. "Built-in Ty…
Java calls them "primitive types", btw.
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That does not mean beginner-friendliness is one of its design goals.
It was though https://www.artima.com/intv/pyscale.html "So I never intended Python to be the primary language for programmers, although it has become the primary language for many Python users. It was intended to be a second language for people who were already experienced programmers, as some of the early design choices reflect. On the other hand, intuitively I probably stuck to many of ABC's design principles. Beca…
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It's not a beginner language, but it is beginner-friendly. It's actually a huge problem if you end up trying to hire people to build enterprise software in Python, because everyone and their mother has "5 years of Python experience", but "scripting on your own" is miles apart from "building well designed systems".
What would you consider a beginner language then?
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I may be missing something, but I can't find any example in my mind which indicates difference between passing in Java and Python. And it's pass-by-value for all types, because for objects an address is the value.
Java primitives (short, float, double, etc...) are copied to the calling function, but arrays and objects are passed by reference. This is easier to explain in a language like C++, which can do either: // Java always does these: void f(Object& o) { ... } // passes objects by reference void g(double x) { ... } // primitives are copied // Java can not do these: void p(Object o) { ... } // copy of the object void q(doub…
It's more like `void f(Object* o) { ... }`
My dislikes:
- no pipe operator - no type checker (something Flow would do) - over dependence on whitespace syntax
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That does not mean beginner-friendliness is one of its design goals.
It was though https://www.artima.com/intv/pyscale.html "So I never intended Python to be the primary language for programmers, although it has become the primary language for many Python users. It was intended to be a second language for people who were already experienced programmers, as some of the early design choices reflect. On the other hand, intuitively I probably stuck to many of ABC's design principles. Beca…
"It was intended to be a second language for people who were already experienced programmers, as some of the early design choices reflect. "
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Note how almost all languages you take as shiny examples of virtue post-date Python: they all learnt from it so much , particularly on things like the stdlib. Python’s stdlib was the gold standard for a long, long time (the “batteries included” slogan was effective for a reason - they really were!). This was not by accident - Guido and others have always had the utmost care for good developer experience out of the bo…
This begs the question though why can't the python ecosystem simply evolve? Is that too much to ask? You say these languages have learned so much from Python. If there is so much to learn in terms of do's and dont's, why doesn't Python simply follow this advice?
Today, if you are interested in a reproducible build environment, you will use pyenv to locally install an interpreter and stdlib, and pipenv to locally (to your project) install libraries and dependencies.
I agree with the OPs points but disagree with the degree to which the author has used them as a means to "hate" a language. I generally avoid Python too but saying you hate the language because of a bunch of contrivances mostly wrought from inexperience and holding too strongly to C like languages is poor form. Versions: Ok? Versioning and fragmentation is a hard problem. Backwards compatibility is a hard problem. Mo…
That's not the point at all. I mean, did you read it?
How do you mischaracterize the specific point about the casual opportunity for foreign module metaprogamming? Module initialization is bad in a pernicious way. While you can't do operator overloading, you can clobber namespaces (which was referenced). Paired with a community repository, this is exactly the same case of what's so dangerous about npm.
Most of the points in this article fall on a continuum between irrelevant to dead wrong. 1 (versions) and 2 (installation) have to do with the ecosystem, not the language. Unsigned packages are a real problem, but hating on community-maintained software is just weird. Most software in your local Linux distro's repository is maintained by a "community" that might just be one person working in their spare time. 3 (synt…
>3 (syntax) seems to be about not supporting the author's own highly idiosyncratic habits Yeah, I don't get the author at all. Using indentation is so, so, so, so, much cleaner and easier to understand, even with lots of nesting than trying to figure out if you closed all the stupid curly braces, curly braces be damned.
Their lack in Python bothered me too, one afternoon in the spring of 2001, then I moved on.
When I hear someone complaining about it I immediately think, this person hasn't much experience with Python, or is one of those highly inflexible pedant types.