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Python Is Eating the World

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#441

Post by pvg »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #303
KirinDave wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not really sure what your point is in criticizing "farming" to C. If Python is so great how come it can't even express a decent data structure that it needs? I'll happily level the same criticism at Ruby if you like. > You made a false claim. Firstly: This is not High School Debate Club. There isn't some kind of point system. Language and expectations like this are not only counterproductive (in that they essen…

> If Python is so great how come it can't even express a decent data structure that it needs? Why is this a requirement of a "great" language? By not requiring a language to be self-hosting, you are adding more degrees of freedom to your language's design, so I could even see an argument that writing it in C is an improvement. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I don't see why cpython written in C implies it is…

you are adding more degrees of freedom to your language's design

Why do you think that? Languages/runtimes with high C integration and fairly exposed C bowels like Python and Ruby have, over time, turned out to be very hard to evolve compatibly.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#442

Post by vkazanov »

einpoklum wrote: post #438
Ensorceled wrote: post #436

Holy Crap! What a lot of irrational, hyperbolic hate for Python. I think everybody should spend their first couple of years working in Fortran IV on IBM TSO/ISPF. No dependency management because you had to write everything yourself. Or maybe [edit: early 90's] C or C++ development where dependency management meant getting packages off a Usenet archive, uudecoding and compiling them yourself after tweaking the config…

https://conan.io/ https://vcpkg.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ You were saying about C/C++ package management?

Yes, pls, go on and tell us how it's a default package management tool for C/C++...

It is a step forward, sure, but it's a far cry from Python's pip or Rust's Cargo or even Dlang's dub.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#443

Post by scandinavian »

blaisio wrote: post #174
ajmurmann wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust's cargo, JS's yarn and the grand daddy of them all Ruby's bundler address all these issues. Even newer versions of Gradle support a workflow where you specify the versions you know you want and just on everything else, including transitive dependencies, down.

Go's new system addresses them all too. This is the other frustrating thing: there is this stockholm syndrome effect, because people are so used to dependency management being horrible, they think there are just no good dependency management systems, and they give up.

What system is this? Isn't the built in package system still just pulling from github URL's?

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#444

Post by wisty »

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…

Docker is one option. Don't worry about sorting out that mess, just clone the whole operating system. sigh

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#445

Post by einpoklum »

vkazanov wrote: post #442
einpoklum wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://conan.io/ https://vcpkg.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ You were saying about C/C++ package management?

Yes, pls, go on and tell us how it's a default package management tool for C/C++... It is a step forward, sure, but it's a far cry from Python's pip or Rust's Cargo or even Dlang's dub.

Python's PIP? Or do you mean Anaconda? Or VirtualEnv? Or Poetry, which someone here has pointed to?

Also - you're moving the rhetorical goalpost. First you claimed there was no package management system, no you're complaining about the lack of default.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#446

Post by moron4hire »

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…

.NETs solution to this was the project file, a configuration file that lists the compiler version, framework version, and dependencies (now including NuGet packages and their versions).

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#447

Post by mnky9800n »

futureastronaut wrote: post #188
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.

People here are just very dramatic. I think I need to not read (or write) HN comments for a long time, there is some serious distorted reality about.

It is inexcusable how dramatic people are on HN.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#448

Post by wtetzner »

yyhhsj0521 wrote: post #429
marble-drink wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only problem with that is it's hard to keep the dependencies up to date. Pip-tools solves this problem.

Why do you want to update your dependencies if they work? Isn't the whole point of dependency management to avoid using different versions of dependencies than the ones they have been tested on?

You want to easily be able to update dependencies (and retest with them, of course) to ensure you’re getting security updates, for one.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#449

Post by rohan1024 »

Ensorceled wrote: post #436

Holy Crap! What a lot of irrational, hyperbolic hate for Python. I think everybody should spend their first couple of years working in Fortran IV on IBM TSO/ISPF. No dependency management because you had to write everything yourself. Or maybe [edit: early 90's] C or C++ development where dependency management meant getting packages off a Usenet archive, uudecoding and compiling them yourself after tweaking the config…

I don't think its hyperbolic. If so many people are complaining then we have a issue. I have tried to learn Python but every time I did, some things kept turning me off.

- First indentation was a issue for me but I looked past it and went ahead to give another go at Python.

- Even the best in class IDE suffer to give any kind of insight into python code.

- Two versions: At my workplace we use Python 2. I prefer to learn newer version but don't have choice. When Python 3 came out they should have initiated deprecation of Python 2 but that does not seem to be the case. Tonnes of libraries are still in Python 2. They should have maintain language backward compatible instead of fragmenting the entire community.

- So many ways to do a thing. This is subjective but I need a language which gives predictable performance for given piece of code. Go does this. There's usually one way of doing things and only one way. No need to know nooks and crannies of the language nor there is such a thing in Go

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#450

Post by captainbland »

I wonder what the consequences of this are given Python's apparently very poor energy consumption profile: https://thenewstack.io/which-programming-languages-use-the-l...

It appears to consume over 17x more power than JavaScript, 40x more power than Java or 75x more than C/Rust. The only language which performed worse than it in terms of pure power consumption was Perl.

While I'm sure these results aren't exactly indicative of day-to-day usage as they're based off of benchmarks which are not exactly representative of day to day use cases it nevertheless raises the question of whether Python is an appropriate choice of language where the application itself is likely to see a high level of total use. I suspect the answer is "more work needs to be done" on the subject to truly assess the impact and a big part of the answer is "depends on how you're using it". It'd be good to see some standardised tests of web frameworks. For instance, load testing a standardised server side version of the TodoMVC project to determine what happens for each framework there, along with what happens when you stick a cache in front of them and so on.

It'd also be interesting to attempt to estimate how much power consumption and hence CO2 generation each given programming language is responsible for given their marketshare and typical usage profiles - although I suspect in practice this would be quite difficult given the diverse usage profiles of modern programming languages. And obviously the fact that machine learning libraries, for instance, will naturally be quite energy intensive - it's probably the case that Python actually does quite well there because most of its popular libraries for that are just wrapping C or similar rather than being pure Python code.

Given the success of V8 and PHP7 in terms of boosting the performance and presumably energy efficiency profile of their respective languages it'd be nice to see the mainline CPython interpreter undertaking a similar kind of transformation. Obviously we have things like PyPy but it seems to me the Python community needs to be united around a solution to this which forks simply are not going to be able to drive.

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