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Python Is Eating the World

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#291

Post by bakery2k »

randomsearch wrote: post #248

According 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…

> Ends not means, almost entirely, for most people who aren’t full-time programmers.

And for many who are. Maybe not on our main projects, but at least for helper tools, side projects etc.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#292

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

xxxpupugo wrote: post #251
KirinDave wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a language, better than MatLab/R/SPSS, which come before it. I don't think so. I think R is a lot more expressive and not really any harder to read. It might have a steeper learning curve, but it's not so bad that I think that actually matters.

I think R is a much worse programming language, like 1 indexing, very unintuitive string manipulation, dataframe being the magic facade that hides complexity, etc. I would choose Python any day if the other option is R.

1-indexing makes sense within the realm in which R shines. It’s only CS people who seem to completely lose their shit when they encounter it. I’m glad Julia also has 1-indexing.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#293

Post by ptx »

KirinDave wrote: post #119
mkl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to value my time quite highly, as I can achieve most things more quickly and easily in Python than any other language I know. Can you be more specific about how it increases your burnout? Is it the language, or someone forcing you to use that linter and settings?

> Is it the language, or someone forcing you to use that linter and settings? It's definitely both. Preface in true internet style: these are just opinions and you may not share them. That's fine. I really don't like Python as a language. I don't like its total lack of composability. I don't like its over-reliance on a very dated vision of OO. I don't like how its list comprehensions aren't generic. I don't like how…

If by generic you mean able to use other types of collections, aren't generator expressions[1] the generic version of list comprehensions?

List comprehension:

  a = [x for x in stuff if x > 1]
Equivalent generic version:

  a = list(x for x in stuff if x > 1)
With your own collection type:

  a = MyCustomCollection(x for x in stuff if x > 1)
[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0289/

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#294

Post by blub »

KirinDave wrote: post #93

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…

Over-sensitive individuals are hard to please and often unhappy. That's more of a personality flaw than a flaw with the current state of software engineering.

If there's one thing wrong with our profession is a lack of ethics and accreditation - we're essentially letting random people build critical infrastructure and utilities.

We don't have a tooling problem, in fact we have too many tools.

I see so many people (especially on HN) fixating on tools, dissecting programming languages, editors and libraries into their most minute parts and then inevitably finding faults in them, disavowing them and swearing that other tools X, Y and Z are purer and worthier.

If you want to stop hating software and improve your burn out, stop caring about irrelevant stuff.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#295

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

isatty wrote: post #171
KirinDave wrote: post #93

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…

I know I’m responding to opinion but: developer productivity isn’t one of the pitfalls of Python. Yes I agree that if you’re using Python for a large scale project involving lots of developers its not the best; but that’s because it doesn’t have a good type system. You can’t work out why people like it so much because of this misconception. The languages that you gave as examples most definitely do _not_ value your p…

The bigger the team, the more distributed the engineers and the bigger the codebase, the more productivity is lost by using scripting languages. I find it infuriating because it is so frustrating and it definitely does not feel productive.

For a lone hacker, its the other way around. Compare e.g. to Golang's "programming at scale" rationale.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#296

Post by reallydontask »

DonHopkins wrote: post #159

It's so refreshing to not see anyone here whining about Python forcing them to indent their code properly. The kind of people who think that's a PROBLEM instead of a FEATURE really should not be ever writing any new code, and instead should be punished by forcing them to maintain other people's code written with that same lazy misguided attitude, until they recognize how self indulgent, inconsiderate, and disrespectf…

Most IDEs have a shortcut to format code.

In over 12 years, as mostly a C# developer, I've only seen one person not use the standard indentation style and this was because he was a junior who didn't know that you could format the code with a shortcut.

edit:

I should point out that it was always rejected at PR time, it just took me a few PRs to realise what the problem was

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#297

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

coleifer wrote: post #201

What stood out to me: online bullying (dressed-up sometimes as concern/outrage) is what led to Guido stepping down. Python is great, but it will never be perfect. But the outrage stuff, the entitlement stuff, essentially anything that happens on Twitter... Python seems like a victim of it's own success. Once it got popular, it couldn't scale the checks that might have stopped this runaway train of shit-tweets and bic…

I dunno, R is also exploding in popularity but it seems to be able to manage itself really well. To the point of successfully creating an environment that attracts women and other underrepresented groups towards it.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#298

Post by TeMPOraL »

danielbarla wrote: post #204
yawaramin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic that Python is relatively not a great language, but IMHO an 80-character line limit is quite reasonable. It's easier to read on smaller screens, easier to view side-by-side diffs, and tends to force you to break up your code more. That said, this shouldn't be a lint, it should just be enforced by a formatting tool as a format-on-save setting. It just destroys all the wasted arguments about formatting…

I'd also add that while perhaps a bit on the pessimistic side, I tend to view the 80 char rule / limit not as an ancient hardware limitation of monitors, but as a limitation of our eyes and visual processing circuitry. There is a reason why newspapers and well laid-out websites don't have 300 char width lines. Those are physically harder to read, whether we want to admit it or not, as our eyes lose track of the flow…

> as a limitation of our eyes and visual processing circuitry.

If so, then why not put the limit on line length without trailing whitespace? Because it makes no sense that with indentation I should lose available characters.

> There is a reason why newspapers and well laid-out websites don't have 300 char width lines.

Yes, and the reason is, print and transportation are expensive, so newspapers found a way to cram as much text as possible in as few pages as possible. You don't see them replicating this style on-line, and neither you see it in magazines that are priced well above their production & distribution costs.

The reason "well laid-out websites" don't have 300 char width lines is because web development is one large cargo culting fest of design. 300 may be a bit much due to actual physical length, but your comment has 200+ on my machine and reads just fine.

I don't buy these "80 chars / short lines and ridiculous font sizes are optimal for the eyes" arguments. They fly in the face of my daily experience.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#299

Post by Daishiman »

pjmlp wrote: post #287
Daishiman wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 running on its own computer, for shell scripting. 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.

Right, but when you're at that point in performance considerations you already have a team of specialists working on multiple angles in performance.

And precisely, for ML code all python libraries run extremely optimized natively compiled code. The language overhead is a minimal consideration. And for business domain code language performance is rarely the limiting factor.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#300

Post by macleginn »

jimnotgym wrote: post #260
tayo42 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python explicitly does not agree with this... Whats the convincing argument for defending this? Ive always heard its just the way python is. Through experience using exceptions for anything other then exceptional situations and errors seems messy.

I suppose that comes back to use cases. I am one of the 'getting things done crowd', rather than a computer scientist. A lot of my work had been in things like EDI, or similar integration code. Imagine you are working through a series of EDI files and trying to post them to a badly documented Rest(ish) API of some enterprise system. If the file is bad (for whatever reason) you need to log the exception and put the fi…

My feelings exactly. I write a lot of kinda scientific code that is not really computational but takes one or more horribly messy datasets and combines them to do some analysis. I now routinely use exceptions to filter out bad/complex data-points to deal with later.
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