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Python Is Eating the World

zdnet.com

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#391

Post by noelwelsh »

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…

There are objective differences between languages. Examples include performance and compile-time checking. These differences are not irrelevant.

Alternatively, if you believe the differences between languages are irrelevant why do you not program everything in assembler?

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#392

Post by mailslot »

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…

Fortran has great linear algebra libraries.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#393

Post by lsc »

blub wrote: post #369
lsc wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin... There was a license for a professional software engineer; they're discontinuing it, apparently due to lack of demand. If folks wanted to get a "software people taking the FE" study gr…

It's a vicious circle. Our industry's working in a survival of the fittest mode, where fitness is almost exclusively measured through profit.

I dunno, man. I own a bunch of stock in BA right now. I bet that the idea of spending twice as much on software engineers and hiring licensed folk to write their software is looking pretty good to Bowing execs right about now, even from a plain profit and loss perspective.

(of course, a lot of professional engineers were involved in building that plane... but it's pretty unlikely that there were any PE software engineers involved, just 'cause there aren't many. Would that have helped? maybe, maybe not. to the detail that I've studied (not.. really all that much) it sounds like they made some really basic mistakes, like relying on a sensor that wasn't redundant, and those mistakes should have been caught by the other engineers. I don't know that it was entirely a software engineering problem. )

As software mistakes get more and more costly, it starts making more and more sense for execs to hire people who are properly licensed to supervise the project. (I mean, assuming such people exist, and for software engineering, right now, you could say such people don't exist.)

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#394

Post by marmaduke »

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…

It sounds like you're bothered by its syntax or lack of sophisticated type system etc. But it's just a tool, not a amusement park.

> why people seem to like it so much?

> cobble together something like a Bayesian model things like PyMC or Edward actually give you performance that's obnoxiously difficult to reproduce

And this, across many domains

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#395

Post by [deleted] »

brainless wrote: post #41
blaisio wrote: post #33

Python has a lot of problems that really slow down development, but they are all fixable. The biggest issue, in my opinion, is in dependency management. Python has a horrible dependency management system, from top-to-bottom. Why do I need to make a "virtual environment" to have separate dependencies, and then source it my shell? Why do I need to manually add version numbers to a file? Why isn't there any builtin way…

I understand what you are saying but "Python has a lot of problems" is not really a list of "only" dependency management issues. Once your project is setup, dependency management is what you do once in two weeks perhaps. Rest is just writing code.

[deleted]

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#396

Post by eeZah7Ux »

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…

> 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.

Spot on. Leftpad (and perhaps the whole js ecosystem) are good examples.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#397

Post by memorysafety »

j88439h84 wrote: post #64
blaisio wrote: post #33

Python has a lot of problems that really slow down development, but they are all fixable. The biggest issue, in my opinion, is in dependency management. Python has a horrible dependency management system, from top-to-bottom. Why do I need to make a "virtual environment" to have separate dependencies, and then source it my shell? Why do I need to manually add version numbers to a file? Why isn't there any builtin way…

The solution to this is Poetry. https://poetry.eustace.io It's good. Projects should use it.

> curl ... | python

Ah goddamnit.

868 lines, including os.rmtree calls and stuff.

Also installable via pip, but... "not recommended", and:

    [RuntimeError]                                                            
    Poetry was not installed with the recommended installer. 
    Cannot update automatically.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#398

Post by ageitgey »

trilila wrote: post #231
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…

What I find worse about Python than other languages is the lack of tooling and a relatively small collection of libs - many of which are half way done. In a last assignment, we decided Python is at most a hobby language. Python is great for machine learning because most research was conducting using this language, and as such, tooling is available. I would use it at most as an API exposing ML but that's pretty much i…

> In a last assignment, we decided Python is at most a hobby language.

I don't know if you are just trolling, but this is the silliest, most detached from reality thing I've read online today. Python was key in building numerous massive public companies like Instagram and Dropbox. It's one of the most popular and widely used programming languages on the planet for everything from APIs to desktop clients to data pipelines. It had a lot of early popularity in the Silicon Valley start-up scene in the early 2000s, even pre-dating the Ruby on Rails web dev trend.

The guy who founded the company that runs this very website wrote about the draw of Python 15 years ago [1] at which point it was already widely used in certain niches. This is before any deep learning libraries existed. I remember first playing with Python around 1999 or so.

> I would use it at most as an API exposing ML but that's pretty much it.

I don't know how old you are or how long you've been in the industry, but the ML thing is a "second act" for Python. Deep learning grew up in a time and place where Python was a good fit which put Python in the right place to benefit. But Python had already lived a long and full life before any of that happened.

It's fine if you don't like Python or don't think it is a good fit for a project, but claiming it is a "hobby language" with a "lack of tooling and a relatively small collection of libs" is a good way to get laughed out of the room. It has one of the largest and most diverse libraries. And as far as tooling, Python is one of the most popular languages for implementing tooling. Check out ansible.

> There are plenty of packages for data science. For building APIs and web stuff usually there aren't. Python is nowhere near NodeJS for instance.

This has got to be a troll, right? Just some of the most popular web frameworks: Django, TurboGears, web2py, Pylons, Zope, Bottle, CherryPy, Flask, Hug, Pyramid, Sanic... Lots of huge websites were originally built with Python like Instagram, Reddit and YouTube. Of course they mature into complex distributed architectures using all kinds of languages, but it's all about the right tool for the job.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#399

Post by StavrosK »

memorysafety wrote: post #397
j88439h84 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to this is Poetry. https://poetry.eustace.io It's good. Projects should use it.

> curl ... | python Ah goddamnit. 868 lines, including os.rmtree calls and stuff. Also installable via pip, but... "not recommended", and: [RuntimeError] Poetry was not installed with the recommended installer. Cannot update automatically.

Yeah, I hate this trend. Unfortunately, you can't pip install poetry because it needs to manage packages, so I guess a different way was necessary. Still, OS-specific packages would be nice, I guess they just need volunteers.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#400

Post by StavrosK »

chii wrote: post #370
jnwatson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Inexcusable". You know this started in 1989 and its major competition was Perl and TCL, right? The same issues exist in C, C++, Java and nobody seems to be complaining about those at the same volume.

this issue outlined above doesn't exist in java, as long as you use maven.

The issue outlined above doesn't exist in Python, as long as you use Poetry.
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