Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Python is Important for You

blaag.haard.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 231 posts

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#51

Post by abecedarius »

espeed wrote: post #17

Python doesn't have the glyph noise that brace-based languages do, and well-written Python is beautiful and easy to read. But lately I have been having an internal debate on whether using autodoc and inline docstrings detracts from its beauty and makes it harder to read because it reduces the amount of code you can see on the screen (see Steve Yegge's rant on this http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/02/portrait-of-n…

I generally write docstrings like "Return the n-fold frobulation around the center (x,y)." That's one line that way and about a half dozen in Javadoc style, without the latter adding much to pay its freight.

What would be worth putting inline but with auto-folding, to me, would be examples.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#52

Post by shazow »

wcarss wrote: post #45
wging wrote: post #11

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most la…

Ruby's blocks and built in regular-expressions are two examples of things you're missing. if result =~ /regex/ that kind of thing is awesome for readability, but it can also be pretty darn slow. There's also some interesting things about the ruby object model and interpreter that are different from python's approach. Whereas in the python REPL you type help(object) to get the docs on that object, in ruby you type obj…

Have a look at IPython for a more code-exploration oriented experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipython (Sadly the homepage doesn't quite get the simpler sell points across as well. http://ipython.org/)

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#53

Post by espeed »

mekoka wrote: post #25
espeed wrote: post #17

Python doesn't have the glyph noise that brace-based languages do, and well-written Python is beautiful and easy to read. But lately I have been having an internal debate on whether using autodoc and inline docstrings detracts from its beauty and makes it harder to read because it reduces the amount of code you can see on the screen (see Steve Yegge's rant on this http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/02/portrait-of-n…

Docstrings should already be easy to detect by editors, so it would be trivial to add a show/hide functionality. Incidentally, one could also use Sphinx to create a plugin for that.

But not all editors have this, nor is it widely used in editors like Emacs.

And GitHub doesn't have it so it can make it harder to get a big-picture view and see the structure of a module when evaluating different libraries online.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#54

Post by loxs »

shazow wrote: post #47
tsunamifury wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankyou! So many programmers seem to forget they have an enormous base of syntax and logic which is not at all like natural language. They see python and say, oh wow this is so easy to read, just like English! But its only an easier way to express a syntax that really is nothing like what a nonprogrammer would consider English.

It varies. When I was helping @limedaring learn Python, I'd read source with her and explain what it does. Quite often I'd feel somewhat embarrassed when explaining what a line does by verbatim reading what it says. "for user in users: ..." "if user.is_admin: ..." It was especially nice that the topic of "what code block does this condition apply to?" did not even occur to either of us. The indentation-based blocks m…

IMHO, decorators, although very useful are a big departure away from python's "simplicity" in syntax. I remember having lots of headaches several years ago wile trying to fit it in my brain. Even after I realized it is something as simple as JavaScript's myfun(fun(){}), my brain somehow continued denying to absorb it.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#55

Post by Luyt »

anthonyb wrote: post #50
Luyt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, you have a point there, but what is your proposal to solve it in a correct way, then? Some problems need a deeply nested control flow and arcane business rules, you have to implement that somehow, and in such a case the method I use looks like the lesser of two evils. I'd rather have some flat ecosystem of meaningful functions than one monolithic deeply nested control structure. From time to time I like defensi…

The way I would do it is to push the processing out to functions, too. Something like: verdict = get_verdict(the_thing) if verdict not in blessedsolutions: return I'd advise against running returns onto the same line - I find it makes it harder to read, particularly when you have a lot of checks like this.

"The way I would do it is to push the processing out to functions, too."

This is indeed a good idea to isolate code away, but wouldn't alleviate a deeply nested control structure. It would make it somewhat more easier to look at, though.

"I'd advise against running returns onto the same line "

I usually follow PEP8 and place returns and continues on the next line, but the code examples I posted earlier had to be a bit condensed to conserve screen space, that's why ;-)

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#56

Post by anthonyb »

Luyt wrote: post #27
user0398 wrote: post #20

Mostly true 'cept for pythons built in pasta makers: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0318/

Yeah, that's fun ;-) I wish there was a if main: ... # do some processing instead of having to write: if __name__ == "__main__": ... # do some processing That'd make DHH happy, too ;-)

I find that the best way to fix this is to write your program as a library, then the part that you're supposed to run as a script which imports and runs it. No __underscore__magic__ required.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#57

Post by scott_w »

pranjalv123 wrote: post #22

My biggest problem with Python is that projects larger than a given size tend to become unmaintainable rather quickly. This is in large part because of the lack of strong typing and type annotations; if you aren't the only author or can't keep the codebase in your head, it takes real effort to figure out what a function does. Even the type annotations provided in a language like Java or C++ make this task much easier…

I must respectfully disagree. I work with web-based systems and find the dynamic typing of Python to be its biggest strength.

The ability to just throw another property onto an object before sending it to the template-engine saves so much engineering work, it totally overcomes the downsides of not annotating required types.

I can see where it may be an issue, but I think the documentation should focus on what function calls need to be supported, as opposed to type-checking i.e. "This function takes an object with the read() and update() methods."

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#58

Post by anthonyb »

pranjalv123 wrote: post #22

My biggest problem with Python is that projects larger than a given size tend to become unmaintainable rather quickly. This is in large part because of the lack of strong typing and type annotations; if you aren't the only author or can't keep the codebase in your head, it takes real effort to figure out what a function does. Even the type annotations provided in a language like Java or C++ make this task much easier…

I find that it's a problem with most languages. Beyond a certain point a project will start to need infrastructure, documentation, code style guidelines and tests - especially when there's more than one developer.

My personal preference is for building a large project as multiple smaller ones, or else leaning on other libraries as much as possible (eg. Numpy, Scipy, pygame)

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#59

Post by Peaker »

agentgt wrote: post #19

I have used Python for a rather long time (I think 1997 when I was 17 was when I first used it). As the the writer of the article stated Python is awesome for writing "tools" and throughout my career I have used it for such. However I have used Python also for big projects and that is where its gets a little messy. I know I am going to get down-voted to kingdom come but I think Java is a better language for big proje…

Just replace Java with Haskell, and you've got yourself a nicer Python replacement.

Less code than either Java or Python, far more compile-time guarantees than either, and nearly as fast as Java when speed matters (speed takes a bit more effort in Haskell than in Java, but compared to Python, it is a no-brainer).

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#60

Post by jshen »

masklinn wrote: post #38
wging wrote: post #11

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most la…

The downside of Ruby is the third-party packages, especially advanced/industrial-strength stuff (NumPy/SciPy for instance). The main upside of Ruby is blocks, however limited (compared to Smalltalk's) the ability to craft your own control structures is incredibly powerful and empowering (and you can't really do that in Python, you can abuse decorators for it nowadays but it's not exactly sexy or readable, or generall…

I'd also say that ruby has done a better job of moving forward. Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. I think JRuby is more mature than jpython, and I know this will start the flames, but I think ruby is clearly better for web stuff; not just rails, but the whole ecosystem. Edit: I also think bundler is better than what is going on in python land.
Post reply on HN