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Python Is Eating the World

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#331

Post by vturner »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #253
heracles wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing, it certainly makes me feel better about my troubles with accepting python. And "the happy path" might be a state you spend a /minority/ of your time in, depending on project. So first you spend 10% of your time to fix the 80% of easy features, but the tricky stuff can be more awful than it should be. And packages. I thought I was just stupid, but thankfully there was more to it.

Quite welcome. I think you are on to something. The thought that comes to mind is "Python is a great language if you want to do exactly what everyone else is doing." Most of the love has nothing to do with the language itself, but rather the fact that people can make use of some library that a big engineering effort produced in another language entirely. Thus they conflate Python with access to that functionality. Al…

Agreed this is it, when people think Python, they think all the default use cases covered by the many libraries that let you "get things done" quickly with syntactic sugar. Alas, there's more to our work than the first few miles of getting things done. There's that scaling part too and python loses it there: no good threading, no enforced typing, bizarre scoping, half baked module system,etc

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#332

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#333

Post by pojzon »

jammygit wrote: post #280
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 look at developer surveys sometimes when I'm trying to decide what to learn next. According to the 2018 stack overflow survey, 68% of python users would like to use it again in the future [1]. The surveys never tell me why though. What do people like or dislike about python? I know it has a lot of libraries people love (scikit-learn, tensorflow come to mind) [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-…

Those surveys are often targeting mosstly newer devs who know no better because they did not have the time to validate their opinion against real world.

Its not thir fault tho, you can only do so much in limited time, thats why expertize requires years.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#334

Post by icebraining »

marmada wrote: post #125
hyperpallium wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a model dependency management system for some other language that addresses all these issues? Dependency hell is everywhere.

Python is uniquely ill-suited for dependency management compared to many other languages. For some reason dependencies are installed into the interpreter itself (I know what I just said is very imprecise/inaccurate but I think it gets the point across). In JS, which also has a single interpreter installed across the system (or multiple if you use nvm), the packages aren't installed "directly" into the interpreter, wh…

Not trying to defend Python, but it's not hard to make it work like JS without virtualenv:

    pip install -r requirements.txt --target=python_modules
Then to run:

    PYTHONPATH=python_modules python myscript.py
This will keep all the dependencies in the local "python_modules" directory. I've used this on a custom SaaS platform, and it worked quite well.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#335

Post by mixmastamyk »

retrobox wrote: post #281
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’m really glad to hear someone else voice these frustrations. I’ve really tried to embrace Python and everyone tells me how great it is. I feel like a failure as a developer but I dislike it so much I quit a job, that switched to Python as the primary language, and took a year off from development. I’m pretty much a polyglot as far as languages go but Python riles me.

Python is the simplest mainstream language yet still reasonably powerful. Some folks don’t like simple and I’ve found it’s better in the long term to find those that do.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#336

Post by TeMPOraL »

olavgg wrote: post #245
yongjik wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. This is 2019, and I like being able to see at least three files side-by-side without squinting my eyes, thank you very much. Yes, I know I'm in the minority these days. :/

I have 3-4 files side by side, Everything else is max 80 chars. I really don't understand why people need more, because long lines are REALLY HARD to read.

You mean like 64 chars, after you account for typical indentation? I hit that limit way too often when using descriptive names.

I usually view two files side by side per screen (so 4 in total). I sometimes up this to 3 per screen, but the trick here is to use a smaller font. Right now, if I split my editor into 3 panes, each has 98 columns available.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#337

Post by metroholografix »

xxxpupugo wrote: post #268

The part that Python really bothers me, as someone who had write Python for almost 10 years, and right now doing it professionally, though personally I don't consider myself a Python developer rather than a Python senior user, is actually obvious to nail down, and frustratingly, difficult to handle. SLOW. The sin of all. I don't want to make other arguments with people who just come to repeat 'Oh you can make it fast…

Same here. I've used Python daily or almost daily for the last ~10 years (thankfully I've used other languages too).

I've architected reliable systems on top of it but it was obvious to me almost from the get-go that Python is a terrible language. I credit my previous years of programming in Lisp that trained my mind to see through the Python mirage.

One issue is that veneer of Python user friendliness that lures people, usually those who are new to programming or don't have extensive experience with _multiple_ languages, in.

The major issue for me is that Python lacks internal consistency and is based on a inverted-design (meaning, no design really) that accumulated over the years and stinks. This makes it really easy for people to use Python and write unmaintenable code but also very hard for them to find out how to write good code. The hallmark of a terrible language is making good code hard to write.

As far as specifics, I think the module system is a joke, the packaging even worse, the REPL is not really a REPL (in the Lisp sense), ctypes is bad and has 100 different ways you can hang yourself with, there are tons of gotchas in the language and standard library that if you haven't memorized [usually by running into them], they will bite you hard, the GIL ties my hands, iterator/generator obsession makes for really bad code messes if people take it seriously and start poorly designing their APIs around it, absence of proper lexical scope, statements are not expressions and led to gross hacks like PEP 572... I could keep going for days.

Python is really the PHP of the 2010 generation.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#338

Post by vturner »

blub wrote: post #294
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 (es…

Oversensitive? Is the contractor who chooses a Dewalt or Ridgid over a Ryobi for daily work "caring about irrelevant stuff"? A drill is a drill right? Why is it different for us in software?

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#339

Post by goto11 »

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…

> folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future barely-trained developers who will ostensibly have to come and work with my code.

It seems you are really complaining about having to write code which is maintainable by others than yourself?

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#340

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

mantap wrote: post #67

In general JavaScript is eating the world. Python still dominates in numerical computing and JavaScript hasn't been able to make a single dent. Because nobody wants to write a.mul(k).add(b) rather than k * a + b or a.set([i,j], b) rather than a[i,j] = b JavaScript's lack of operator overloading is keeping Python alive. Python also has integers that feel part of the language, rather than being segregated from normal n…

There's also the C FFI. Syntax is important, but so is being able to integrate with BLAS/LAPACK.
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