371–380 of 459 posts
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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.
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It is hard to believe that Python is objectively that much more productive than other languages. I know Python moderately well (with much more real world experience in C#). I like Python very much but I don't think it is significantly more productive than C#.
Python is out of this world more productive in the Science space and Data space. The only thing that can compete with it for productivity in the science space is R.
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…
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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…
I think one reason for Python growing popularity is because it's become the default tool in some domains whether it is the best tool or not. This week our Director ordered a total rewrite of two years of work in Python. His rationale: it's what everyone else uses in this space. No reason specific to our use case, just simply to follow the herd. I realise that a large community translates into easy hiring and rich eco…
... and Python _became_ the default tool because the de facto developer consensus (after years of competing languages) is that an interpreted language should = be usable, and = provide a set of data structures that an educated programmer *expects to find when scripting*. Python literally sucked less than the alternatives.
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Agreed. Coincidentally, I resigned the day before this was announced.
Sorry if it sounds too cynical, but that's probably the intended effect of a rewrite from what the team knows into Python: staffing changes. A bunch of the (expensive) old guard will leave and they can be replaced with cheap grads, who all know Python. Better luck with the next one!
This article is garbage. It reads like SEO trash and I'm not sure why Github feels the need to publish it. It's just a list of common Python talking points. Points that the author displays a poor understanding of.
The article doesn't really attempt to explain why python keeps growing but the facts listed vaguely suggest that it "keeps growing" (not sure when it was supposed to die) because it is Good and Popular. Which makes sense, I guess.
If the title was '10 Cool Facts About Python (a Programming Language!)' I would probably find it a little bit funny.
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 switched to python last year because it has an excellent builtin library. No more having to download random crappy libraries that download even more crappy libraries.
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> to me it's a Monkey's Paw of software development This piqued my curiosity. I've worked with Python on and off for the last ~20 years, and while I'm not a fanboy or apologist, and use other tools when appropriate, there's also a reason it remains in my toolbox and sees regular use while many other tools have come/gone/been replaced by something better. Can you share an example scenario where it's a Monkey's Paw? My…
Dependency management/tooling. Python (philosophically) treats the whole system as a dependency by default, in contrast with other modern languages that operate at the project/workspace level. This means it's very hard to isolate separate projects under the same system, or to reproducibly get a project running on a different system (even the same OS, because the system-wide state of one machine vs the next matters so…
Virtualenvs, and requirements are a thing in Python for ages.
I’ve used tons of languages and while not the best, Python dependency management and project isolation is decent. IMO certainly better than JavaScript.