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Reasons Python Sucks

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Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#441

Post by trashcan »

toyg wrote: post #427
lmm wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was not by accident - Guido and others have always had the utmost care for good developer experience out of the box. How many languages pack an editor ready to go? Or a way to install modules with a single command? Not even Java, with all its commercial might, ever achieved that - it barely got a REPL last year, which Python has had for what, 20 years now? The Java module experience is miles ahead of the Pytho…

> and that's it, you're done You are seriously comparing Maven, a huge and over-complicated xml-based system that is not even installed by default and that people hate so much that there are umpteen alternatives (gradle etc), with `pip install -r requirements.txt` that works out of the box? I just can't even... > Python still doesn't have anything [like Maven] And I thank the Gods for that.

> with `pip install -r requirements.txt` that works out of the box?

Works out of the box until you're missing a distro package that is required to build a dependency that needs to be compiled from source.

I've never used maven so I don't know if it is better or worse, but I am not a fan of languages having their own package management system that has not integration with the distro one (which probably also offers some of the same packages, and mixing them breaks things in subtle, annoying ways).

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#442

Post by PaulHoule »

orf wrote: post #389
PaulHoule wrote: post #150

The version problem is Python being a victim of its own success. Since so many Linux distros used Python 2 for system scripting, you still have to have a Python 2 sitting around on your system somewhere. Then people came along with "python3" and (yikes!) "pip3", but now you might have python 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7. The transition was pretty painful because of the Unicode thing. It does make it painful, though, to give…

> I am converging towards the solution, however, of installing Python straight from the python web site with the appropriate version, hiding that Python somewhere where people won't mess with it, then working out of a venv. Pyenv[1] is your friend. pyenv install 3.6.4 1. https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

That "shim executable" trick sounds evil to me.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#443

Post by orf »

PaulHoule wrote: post #442
orf wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am converging towards the solution, however, of installing Python straight from the python web site with the appropriate version, hiding that Python somewhere where people won't mess with it, then working out of a venv. Pyenv[1] is your friend. pyenv install 3.6.4 1. https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

That "shim executable" trick sounds evil to me.

How so? There are lots of evil tricks at most layers. This one is particularly effective, and I can't think of another solution to it.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#444

Post by AgentME »

lmm wrote: post #390
toyg wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note how almost all languages you take as shiny examples of virtue post-date Python: they all learnt from it so much , particularly on things like the stdlib. Python’s stdlib was the gold standard for a long, long time (the “batteries included” slogan was effective for a reason - they really were!). This was not by accident - Guido and others have always had the utmost care for good developer experience out of the bo…

> This was not by accident - Guido and others have always had the utmost care for good developer experience out of the box. How many languages pack an editor ready to go? Or a way to install modules with a single command? Not even Java, with all its commercial might, ever achieved that - it barely got a REPL last year, which Python has had for what, 20 years now? The Java module experience is miles ahead of the Pytho…

> transient dependency resolution is deterministic, so you don't have to worry about pinning/unpinning or anything like that

Is that true? I see a lot of pom.xml files specifying version ranges for dependencies. If I have a project specify a dependency that has its own dependencies with version ranges specified, then there doesn't seem to be an easy way for me to pin all the subdependency versions. (Yarn and npm both generate a lock file automatically, pinning all dependency and subdependency versions, which seems great.) It seems like I could specify all of the subdependencies in my own pom.xml file too with specific versions, but maven doesn't appear to make that easy to do.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#445

Post by tigershark »

notacoward wrote: post #70

Most of the points in this article fall on a continuum between irrelevant to dead wrong. 1 (versions) and 2 (installation) have to do with the ecosystem, not the language. Unsigned packages are a real problem, but hating on community-maintained software is just weird. Most software in your local Linux distro's repository is maintained by a "community" that might just be one person working in their spare time. 3 (synt…

It’s even false that python passes parameters by reference. It passes the references by value, that is a completely different thing. It’s really easy to prove it by implementing a function swap(a, b) and looking at the values of a and b after calling the swap function. Obviously a and b are not swapped because they are not passed by reference, but instead the references are passed by value. It’s an article written by someone that doesn’t have the slightest idea of python if even I, that I used it only a bunch of times, don’t make this beginner errors... Btw I don’t like python, I prefer to it a lot of other programming languages.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#446

Post by unethical_ban »

geezerjay wrote: post #250
dkarl wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: Also fuck this whole "it's so cool to shit on Java" thing. Grow up. You aren't in college anymore. You should recognize that Java fills its niche effectively, and does a decent job of being semi-fast, portable, easy to read and maintain, and safe. The "it's so cool to shit on Java" thing served an important purpose and is probably close to being retired, but it's easy not to understand if you weren't a Java pro…

> The "it's so cool to shit on Java" thing served an important purpose and is probably close to being retired I don't know in which world you live in, but in the real world Java is by far the dominant platform for web services.

Does that apply to any web service that meets the following criteria?

  * Created in the last 5 years
  * Built by an organization without a large Java heritage
I bet that number goes waaaay down, way quick.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#447

Post by unethical_ban »

bakery2k wrote: post #165
setpatchaddress wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. After indentation-as-syntax -- which I've always hated, and I've been using Python since version 1.5 -- lack of switch statement is my #1 problem with Python.

> indentation-as-syntax -- which I've always hated What would you prefer? C-style syntax? Ruby-style `end end end`?

Literally anything that allowed easier linting, less "wait am I doing it right" regarding multi-line statements, etc.

If that is a keyword, or brackets, or whatever, I would prefer that. You can't minify or easily lint python. And you can't easily tell if there are mixed indent methods (tabs/spaces) and IDEs struggle with it vs. a simple bracket structure.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#448

Post by unethical_ban »

riskable wrote: post #210
jaxtellerSoA wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3 (syntax) seems to be about not supporting the author's own highly idiosyncratic habits Yeah, I don't get the author at all. Using indentation is so, so, so, so, much cleaner and easier to understand, even with lots of nesting than trying to figure out if you closed all the stupid curly braces, curly braces be damned.

I asked a "C all the things!" developer a while back why he hated Python's enforced indentation and in a whole lot of words he basically said that it makes it difficult to visually track scope when you have long chains of conditionals. The standard Python developer response to that is, "Aha! You like braces because they enable your bad programming practices !" However, I found the best way to illustrate that point is…

Literally anything other than spaces that allowed easier linting, less "wait am I doing it right" regarding multi-line statements, etc.

If that is a keyword, or brackets, or whatever, I would prefer that. You can't minify or easily lint python. And you can't easily tell if there are mixed indent methods (tabs/spaces) and IDEs struggle with it vs. a simple bracket structure.

(This is a rare repost within a thread. I'm punching that card for 2018. Whitespace significance is my #1 issue with Python. I love the language, hate this feature.)

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#449

Post by twblalock »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #3

A number of these points seem like reasonable opinions to have. But two which had me questioning the breadth of the author's experience were "Most programming languages pass function parameters by value." and "In every other language, arrays are called 'arrays'. In Python, they are called 'lists'." To the author: 1. Java, JavaScript and C# all have types which are passed by reference. (They also have types which are…

Java passes by value. The value being passed happens to be a copy of a pointer (properly called a "reference" in the spec, which confuses people). A copy of a pointer points to the same place as the original pointer. For normal use cases this works very well.

However, if you reassigned your copy of a pointer in the body of a function, the original pointer would still point to the same place it did before the function was called.

That's not the same thing as actual pass-by-reference in languages like C++.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#450

Post by InclinedPlane »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #3

A number of these points seem like reasonable opinions to have. But two which had me questioning the breadth of the author's experience were "Most programming languages pass function parameters by value." and "In every other language, arrays are called 'arrays'. In Python, they are called 'lists'." To the author: 1. Java, JavaScript and C# all have types which are passed by reference. (They also have types which are…

Also, in javascript the thing that's called "an array" is actually a hashmap, because everything in javascript is secretly just a hashmap.
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