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Reasons Python Sucks

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Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#271

Post by mixmastamyk »

compiler-guy wrote: post #239
drewrv wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kind of problems can be solved or avoided altogether by a decent editor.

I don't see how. An editor can help you get indentations that are syntactically valid, but can't possibly know if the programmer intends the program below to print plain "foo" or both "foo" and "bar". print("foo") # x is false for the problem if x: do_something() print("bar") And to the parent who has written a lot of code but never had this problem, well, some people do.

That's a two space error and easy to see.

> never had this problem, well, some people do.

Neophytes also have a lot of problems with matching braces, neither is a panacea to those folks. But one is easier to read and type for everyone else, for years to come.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#272

Post by johnr2 »

geezerjay wrote: post #250
dkarl wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: Also fuck this whole "it's so cool to shit on Java" thing. Grow up. You aren't in college anymore. You should recognize that Java fills its niche effectively, and does a decent job of being semi-fast, portable, easy to read and maintain, and safe. The "it's so cool to shit on Java" thing served an important purpose and is probably close to being retired, but it's easy not to understand if you weren't a Java pro…

> The "it's so cool to shit on Java" thing served an important purpose and is probably close to being retired I don't know in which world you live in, but in the real world Java is by far the dominant platform for web services.

> I don't know in which world you live in, but in the real world Java is by far the dominant platform for web services.

I read it as meaning 'the "it's so cool to shit on Java" thing' is close to retirement, not the language itself.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#273

Post by pfranz »

qntty wrote: post #59
colanderman wrote: post #35

A better reason to hate Python: the internal model is way overcomplicated for what it's meant to be: a beginner-friendly scripting language. "Everything-is-an-object", duck typing, decorators, bizarre scoping rules, etc., all make it difficult for experienced programmers to understand, let along beginners. I've always thought there's a much simpler language struggling to get out of Python, and I wish it would and wou…

Is python really meant to be a beginner-friendly language? I tend to think of it as lisp-without-parens, and lisp is not very beginner friendly.

In practice, snippets of Python look very similar to pseudocode. A lot of the idiosyncrasies I see people bring up I consider "intermediate" or "advanced" Python. For the first 5 years I used Python I never wrote a class or a module (I was familiar enough to know when I saw one), let alone cared what a meta-class was.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#274

Post by srfilipek »

com2kid wrote: post #164
notacoward wrote: post #70

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…

#7 is so very wrong in so many ways. Even languages that are pure "pass by value" cheat pass the value of a reference for objects. Very few languages support doing a deep copy when passing an object. I'm trying to think of a single one, and I know that none of the major ones do. C will pass an entire struct, and so long as the struct doesn't have any pointers, sure... But even in C passing a struct by value is highly…

That one dumbfounded me as well.

Has the author never given a pointer as an argument to a function before? Do they make copies of their strings and structs every time they want to pass it around? I just... I just don't understand how they could think that.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#275

Post by earenndil »

closed wrote: post #116
fhood wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how far off the author was, because there are genuine things to complain about with python, though they may not be exclusive to python. I regularly wish python required some sort type indication for function parameters, because dealing with libraries that take complex objects as function parameters can be an absolute nightmare. I wish python had some equivalent to the switch statement that didn't involve w…

> I regularly wish python required some sort type indication for function parameters You can use type annotations, either via the builtin lib or 3rd party libs! https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html > do_x() if a.y() I feel this. You can use `a.y() and do_x()`, but I'm not sure how people would react :o

Type annotations don't seem to actually have any effect, though? Consider:

    >>> def add(a: int, b: int):
    ...     return a+b
    ... 
    >>> add("a", "b")
    'ab'
This should be an error, even if it's a runtime error.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#276

Post by civility »

baddox wrote: post #264
civility wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Java primitives (short, float, double, etc...) are copied to the calling function, but arrays and objects are passed by reference. Not really. "Pass by reference" is a specific term for a much different technique which is very rarely encountered these days. It means that if you pass a variable "foo" to a function, that function can assign "foo" to some other value and the value of "foo" will also be changed outside…

> "Pass by reference" is a specific term for a much different technique which is very rarely encountered these days.

C++ isn't all that rare.

I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree whether your definition of pass by reference is universal. Given your definition, can you name any language with calling semantics which are not pass-by-value? I mean, you're always passing the value of something (be it the actual value, the address of the memory where the data is stored, or the pointer to the string containing the name of the data in an associative array).

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#277

Post by compiler-guy »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #271
compiler-guy wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how. An editor can help you get indentations that are syntactically valid, but can't possibly know if the programmer intends the program below to print plain "foo" or both "foo" and "bar". print("foo") # x is false for the problem if x: do_something() print("bar") And to the parent who has written a lot of code but never had this problem, well, some people do.

That's a two space error and easy to see. > never had this problem, well, some people do. Neophytes also have a lot of problems with matching braces, neither is a panacea to those folks. But one is easier to read and type for everyone else, for years to come.

It's a two space error in a trivial example that no editor can help with.

If the function is longer or their are a couple of additional levels of indentation, and it isn't a print statement, but some additional logic, it is a hard problem to spot.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#279

Post by mixmastamyk »

compiler-guy wrote: post #277
mixmastamyk wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a two space error and easy to see. > never had this problem, well, some people do. Neophytes also have a lot of problems with matching braces, neither is a panacea to those folks. But one is easier to read and type for everyone else, for years to come.

It's a two space error in a trivial example that no editor can help with . If the function is longer or their are a couple of additional levels of indentation, and it isn't a print statement, but some additional logic, it is a hard problem to spot.

Not true, look up indentation guides and whitespace visibility. Even my barebones editor has them and squashes ambiguity.

Still at some point one needs to be responsible for the code they write, braces or not. Braces are not a guaranteed solution either, if the author gives up complete responsibility.

Basically, this is a theoretical non-problem. The lack of braces pays back in readability every single day. Like +100 + -2, then complaining about the -2.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#280

Post by hpcjoe »

peterwwillis wrote: post #47

This rant would have been exactly the same if he had just discovered Perl5. It's got way more quirks than Python, but you deal with it, because the language is super useful. The one valid gripe that wasn't quite there is why doesn't Python (or any other language really) manage its modules like CPAN? CPAN is amazing. It's ancient and dusty and missing obvious modern improvements, but it's still way more useful than an…

I remember the perl4 to perl5 transition. I had some perl4 code I wrote to automate runs of my code. Porting it to perl5 made me grumble a little, but it was mostly very minor changes. About an hour of work for all my code.

But, yeah ... CPAN, and C-TAN, are things to behold. Python hasn't done a great/good job with this. Npm is just plain awful. Julia's Pkg was good in the 0.6.x days ... seems to be borked now, though this may be due to the 0.6 -> 1.0 transition.

For me, Perl is my go-to scripting language. I've written some pretty intensive apps in it, which would be horrifying in other languages. It has (many) warts, though packaging isn't one of them.

I am looking at using Julia for scripting in places where I'd ordinarily use Perl ... mostly data clean up. This noted, it is very hard to beat Perl in munging data. R comes close, but writing parsers in it is hard.

Perl6 aka Rakudo is very interesting to me. Addresses many of the issues I've had with Perl in the past, and gives some truly incredible power going forward. Adoption appears to be low and slow right now. I don't actually have time to play with it now, as I've got other higher priority issues to deal with.

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