Python Is Eating the World • Hacker News Board

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#341

Post by kbenson » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:13 AM UTC

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…

Is that supposed to help someone? I fail to see how telling someone "just ignore the stuff that irks you that you have to spend 40+ hours a week dealing with. You are overly sensitive and your concerns are irrelevant" helps anyone. Even if it was true, it was delivered in such a ham-fisted manner that I can't imagine anyone taking it to heart.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#342

Post by antupis » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:13 AM UTC

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…

There is great saying that Python is the second-best language for everything and it might be true. Where Python excels is that you have good-enough libraries and support almost everything. All other languages have some pain points where they shine very brightly in some areas but they have very bad or non-existing libraries and support to other areas.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#343

Post by copperx » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:14 AM UTC

vturner wrote: post #312

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…

Thanks for posting. I've wondered if it's just me or does anyone else want to leave software engineering because of Python's dominance. There's no arguing against it either because as this thread shows, "I like it for my use case, look at these libraries that let you get X and Y done SOOOO easy, so it must be great for everything."

I've contemplated leaving SE behind because of JavaScript, not because of Python. Do you tolerate JS?

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#344

Post by icebraining » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:14 AM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #112

atoav wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dependency hell is everywhere. Excuse me, but as a long time Python user I have to disagree. I started using Rust two years ago and Rust’s dependency managment is easily the best thing I ever saw (keep in mind that I didn’t see everything , so there is a chance there are better things out there). The project-/dependency-manager Cargo ¹ is more “pythonic” than anything Python ever came up with and where others mumbl…

There's a pattern to this. The later the dependency manager was created, the better it is. This is a hard problem space where each new language got to use the lessons learned on the earlier ones. Cargo, though, has a silver bullet. If it can't find a solution to determine a single version for a package, it simply includes more than one version in the object code. That would take a lot of work to duplicate in Python.

Python has had multi-version installation of libraries for a long time: https://packaging.python.org/guides/multi-version-installs/

Unfortunately, pip came along and took over, despite lacking support for that. It would have been nice if a better packaging tool had replaced easy_install, but alas.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#345

Post by cryptica » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:15 AM UTC

The number of views of questions on Stack Overflow is a bad metric to measure language popularity. This metric combines popularity and complexity/unintuitiveness. If a language is half as popular but twice as complex (or unintuitive) as another language, then it will get the same number of questions and same number of views.

If the language is becoming more fragmented; more different kinds of frameworks and tools then it will translate to more questions on stack overflow. Fragmentation of the language is not necessarily a good (or bad) thing but it has nothing to do with the popularity of the language.

But definitely the JavaScript ecosystem is pretty homogeneous at the moment (ReactJS or VueJS on the front end and Node.js on the backend).

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#346

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:18 AM UTC

flyinglizard wrote: post #187

I feel like the world has gone insane when it comes to Python. Or have I gone insane? Python is an incredible waste of time. No types, IDEs that suck (a side effect of not having types), very partial validation with linting tools that are an afterthought to the language, indentation is a mess (good luck moving files between different editors and environments or through clipboards), slow, agonizing deployment (pyenv?…

Pycharm is pretty excellent in terms of IDEs. It's quite literally IntelliJ for python.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#347

Post by goto11 » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:18 AM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #212

geewee wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common "don't use exceptions for control flow" is broken right off the bat with StopIteration. I just think error handling in Python is god awful, really. That's not an idiom python has ever subscribed to though, it's always subscribed to the "Better to ask forgiveness than permission" - I think there are strengths to both viewpoints, but honestly I think "don't use exceptions for control flow" is more of a conve…

> honestly I think "don't use exceptions for control flow" is more of a convention that a "truth" In absolute terms or when coding on paper, perhaps. But in the real world and if performance even remotely matters, it’s as close to a universal rule all languages end up embracing or turning into creaking hulks of slow code given how exceptions work in practice at the level of cpu execution units. C#/IL/.NET embraced ex…

If you care that much about performance you probably shouldn't use Python in the first place. Python deliberately prioritize ease of development above performance.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#348

Post by flyinglizard » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:22 AM UTC

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #346

flyinglizard wrote: post #187

I feel like the world has gone insane when it comes to Python. Or have I gone insane? Python is an incredible waste of time. No types, IDEs that suck (a side effect of not having types), very partial validation with linting tools that are an afterthought to the language, indentation is a mess (good luck moving files between different editors and environments or through clipboards), slow, agonizing deployment (pyenv?…

Pycharm is pretty excellent in terms of IDEs. It's quite literally IntelliJ for python.

Python’s lack of typing means the IDE heavily uses heuristics. It’s nowhere near as good as Intellisense on C#. Take refactoring a variable name as an example.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#349

Post by ourlordcaffeine » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:22 AM UTC

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…

There is a lot of hype and "they are using it too" mentality as well I think. I am working on control software which, if it crashes or even takes a tiny bit too long to issue a command, could cause the company big financial loss. I was forced to do it in python "because everyone else is using python".

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#350

Post by lucb1e » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 8:22 AM UTC

For what it's worth, I have none of the issues the currently top voted comments describe. Dependency hell (apt does that for me), closer to burnout any time I work with it, would rather work with C++ (a language with a completely different purpose)? If the author of the article had written this, people would fall over themselves to say how wrong they are. Nearly everyone who tried Python loves it. From this thread you'd think we're talking about Visual Basic for Applications.

There is a reason Python is one of the most popular languages. PHP was popular because it's quick and dirty, but Python is popular because people love working with it. The arguments in this thread are beyond me. (They're also unsubstantiated, but if I ask for substantiation I'm sure someone can rationalize some reasons to dislike any language, so that's pointless.)