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Why Python keeps growing, explained

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Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#281

Post by kaba0 »

codethief wrote: post #274
kaba0 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which can be inlined/speculated away easily. It won’t be as fast as well-optimized C++ (mostly due to memory layout), but there is no reason why it couldn’t get arbitrarily close to that.

> Which can be inlined/speculated away easily. How so? Python is dynamically typed after all and even type annotations are merely bolted on – they don't tell you anything about the "actual" type of an object, they merely restrict your view on that object (i.e. what operations you can do on the variable without causing a type error). For instance, if you add additional properties to an object of type A via monkey-patc…

A function/part of code is performed say a thousand times, the runtime collects statistics that object ‘a’ was always an integer, so it might be worthwhile to compile this code block to native code with a guard on whether ‘a’ really is an integer (that’s very cheap). The speedup comes from not doing interpretation, but taking the common case and making it natively fast and in the slow branch the complex case of “+ operator has been redefined” for example can be handled simply by the interpreter. Python is not more dynamic than Javascript (hell, python is strongly typed even), which hovers around the impressive 2x native performance mark.

Also, if you are interested, “shapes” are the primitives of both Javascript and python jit compilers instead of regular types.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#282

Post by analog31 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #93
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…

Your comment is super interesting because it suggests Python has evolved in a direction opposite to the Python Paradox - http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html Whereas before you could get smarter programmers using Python, now because of the exponential growth of Python, the median Python programmer is likely someone with little or no software engineering or computer architecture background who is basically just gluing…

Perhaps today its not smart programmers per se, but smart people who are interested in learning to program.

The libraries are the killer feature for me.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#283

Post by pbourke »

dagw wrote: post #163
ofrzeta wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say if you do data-intenstive computation with Numpy you are not leaving much on the table due to Python.

I've rewritten real world performance critical numpy code in C and easily gotten 2-5x speedup on several occasions, without having to do anything overly clever on the C side (ie no SIMD or multiprocessing C code for example).

I’ve done the same but moved from vanilla numpy to numba. The code mostly stayed the same and it took a couple hours vs however long a port to C or Rust would have taken.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#284

Post by benrutter »

pkolaczk wrote: post #259
benrutter wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I find figuring out type errors is usually less work than figuring out the runtime bugs they prevented.

I agree, but for something like the CRUD app example I made bringing in pydantic or something would solve that. Rust's type system is a lot stricter because it's solving problems in a space that doesn't touch a lot of Python developers.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#285

Post by [deleted] »

dkarl wrote: post #270
Yoric wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with the description. What worries me, though, is that the features that make Python quite good at prototyping make it rather bad at auditing for safety and security. And we live in a world in which production code is prototyping code, which means that Python code that should have remained a quick experiment – and more often than not, written by people who are not that good at Python or don't care about…

I sometimes think about what Python would be like if it were written today, with the hindsight of the last thirty years. Immutability would be the default, but mutability would be allowed, marked in some concise way so that it was easy to calculate things using imperative-style loops. Pervasive use of immutable instances would make it impossible for libraries to rely on mutating objects a la SQLAlchemy. The language…

[deleted]

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#286

Post by butterfly771 »

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…

In fact, the development of the world is based on constant levels of abstraction, just think of assembly language and computer punch tape programming, those days are not long past.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#287

Post by EamonnMR »

blensor wrote: post #173
CE02 wrote: post #169

One thing I’d add to this conversation, though I’m certain it’s already been stated: As many have mentioned, there is a large subset of the user base that uses Python for applied purposes in unrelated fields that couldn’t care less about more granular aspects of optimization. I work as a research assistant for international finance faculty and I would say that compared to the average Hackernews reader, I’m technologi…

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 have python on my phone and use it to calculate tips sometimes.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#288

Post by [deleted] »

dkarl wrote: post #270
Yoric wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with the description. What worries me, though, is that the features that make Python quite good at prototyping make it rather bad at auditing for safety and security. And we live in a world in which production code is prototyping code, which means that Python code that should have remained a quick experiment – and more often than not, written by people who are not that good at Python or don't care about…

I sometimes think about what Python would be like if it were written today, with the hindsight of the last thirty years. Immutability would be the default, but mutability would be allowed, marked in some concise way so that it was easy to calculate things using imperative-style loops. Pervasive use of immutable instances would make it impossible for libraries to rely on mutating objects a la SQLAlchemy. The language…

[deleted]

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#289

Post by noirscape »

dekhn wrote: post #248
DeathArrow wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

Mostly because JSON is one of the most common formats used when sending over data. I think this practice started with pythons requests (which is my real answer as to what you should use in python but I wanted to focus on the stdlib), which has a json function on the Response object for convenience.

Most languages nowadays tend to implement some variation of this specific convenience because it's just one of the most frequently needed things; setting up a separate parser and then calling it might be the "cleaner" option, but it's also more boilerplate and the industry has largely moved to try and avoid that.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#290

Post by wongarsu »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #177
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.

Agreed. Python's REPL has basically totally replaced my usage of Emacs calc as a desk calculator, mainly because it is always there and if I don't know the big-brain closed-form solution for something like compound interest, I can just write a loop and figure it out that way.

So what you are saying is that Python is Excel for programmers :D
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