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…
Python Is Eating the World
281–290 of 993 posts
Re: Python Is Eating the World
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that's what I said, there are plenty of packages for data science. For building APIs and web stuff usually there aren't. Python is nowhere near NodeJS for instance. But whatever suits, if you only know one language, it will seem like the best language out there.
No? You have Django and DRF and Flask. DRF is, by far, the best designed framework for building APIs in any programming language I have ever seen, and I've at this game for a long time. JavaScript has 10 times more packages than PyPi, and for the most part they are absolute garbage with no intent on being maintained. Python has substantially fewer packages where the community rallies around them and keeps them as bes…
Re: Python Is Eating the World
#283Reading 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…
Re: Python Is Eating the World
#284According to people who work with a lot of programmes teaching coding, the reason python is so appealing to new coders is the syntax. Particularly the lack of braces, the indents, the nice keywords, that make reading code much easier to a newcomer. Having taught both python and JavaScript, I can tell you that the former is far far less confusing to newcomers than the latter. Imagine explaining the problem with equali…
Since most of my professional experience is with C like syntax languages, I don't get how the lack of braces is an advantages, quite the opposite in my limited experience with Python.
Braces define scope unequivocally, they are easy to visually parse and don't care whether you are using tabs or spaces or even if you, loud gasp, mix them. Furthermore, you can copy and paste, say for loop from a method to another method and it will work. In Python you might have to faff about with spaces (I'm sure there must be IDEs that solve this problem but it was no fun on vim or even notepad++)
Re: Python Is Eating the World
#285If only its package management were as easy as its syntax... I wish pip worked the same way as npm: -g flag installs it globally, otherwise it creates a local "python_modules" folder I can delete at any time. And optionally I can save the dependency versioning info to some package.json... Instead, pip is a nightmarish experience where it fails half the time and I have no idea where anything is being installed to and…
Use Conda envs!
As someone who has to look after a bunch of servers used by researchers, conda is the biggest cause of things failing for everyone.
conda installs stuff all over the place and its very easy to install conflicting stuff in the same place.
I just wish that either venv was automatic, or at least the second thing you learn in python.
Re: Python Is Eating the World
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re. linting, I'd highly recommend Black with whatever line length you want - it'll reliably reformat your code, and once you lose the urge to reformat while typing it's fantastic. It's like deleting a bunch of useless mental code. And the code reviews are even better: include a linting step (ideally with isort) in CI and you can avoid 95% of formatting comments.
I've had some issues with black formatting some code differently depending on the OS it's run on. So perhaps almost reliably is more correct.
Re: Python Is Eating the World
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell that to accounting that is paying for AWS instance usage. Facebook has an interesting talk about how much electricity 1% performance improvement saves.
You're not Facebook. The carbon footprint of a single developer is comparatively gigantic for the vast majority of projects most people work on.
If it is trying to process ML data, or running in some cloud provider, or deployed in some IoT device supposed to run for years without maintenance, then maybe yes.
Re: Python Is Eating the World
#288Reading 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 am about to hit a decade of python experience. I work with it daily, all my major codebases are written in it. I hate it. It has an ok object system which is possibly its only redeeming quality. I found Racket about 4 years ago, and any new project that I work on will be in Racket or CL. I could go on at length about the happy path mentality of python and the apologists who are too ignorant of other people's use ca…
I think you need to look at it historically. Against other languages circa 2000, Python was a huge win. Easy to write (compared to C), consistent (compared to PHP), minimalist (compared to Perl), multi-paradigm and playing well with C (compared to Java), with a great standard library (compared to Lisp).
Today, the landscape is very different. Lot of languages took hints from and got influenced by Python (including Racket I am sure). Functional languages have taken off. Type inference is a standard feature.
History is always changing. There is some potential for a next Python, but we don't know what it will look like yet. I suspect it will be functional, but I don't think it will be in the Lisp family. It probably won't happen until after Rust and/or Julia get lot more adopted. Anyway, just like C, Python will be with us for decades to come, for better or worse.
Re: Python Is Eating the World
#289Re: Python Is Eating the World
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
F#, OCaml and Haskell Can I quickly prototype a new deep learning model and scale it to a 32 GPU cluster with very little effort in those languages?
If you put in as much time as you have learning Python, then the answer is probably yes.
What does it mean? Have you done it in any of those language? Have you seen it done in any of those languages?