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Python Is Eating the World

zdnet.com

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#511

Post by saagarjha »

wasnthere wrote: post #435
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…

saddened to see this poorly constructed comment berating python at the top of this thread. the author seems to have some personal issues with the language given the generally frustrated tone of the comment. the entire comment could have just been 1 line "We need official support for a modern package management system, from the Python org itself." which would be consumed as constructive feedback by all readers with th…

> the entire comment could have just been 1 line "We need official support for a modern package management system, from the Python org itself."

I personally would consider this to be a strictly worse comment because it does not go into detail about what’s lacking like the parent comment does.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#512

Post by willtim »

p1esk wrote: post #261
willtim wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really enjoy working with python over any other language. I assume you mean, "over any other language I have tried" ? As someone with a mathematical background myself, I am always surprised at how many data scientists and quants are ignoring more mathematically principled languages like F#, OCaml and Haskell.

F#, OCaml and Haskell Can I quickly prototype a new deep learning model and scale it to a 32 GPU cluster with very little effort in those languages?

Not until the libraries get built. They didn't exist for Python either until fairly recently in the history of all these languages.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#513

Post by inoop »

odiroot wrote: post #458
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…

Agreed. I really don't understand all these buckets filth being poured on Python in this thread. It's a first language I worked with in my life that just clicked with my brain and doesn't just drain me. I would take a Python job over a Java/C/C++/Go/Rust any day. There's some languages that could pull me away from Python (Nim, Crystal) but they're nowhere popular enough to move wholesale to them.

> I would take a Python job over a Java/C/C++/Go/Rust any day

it's funny, I feel the exact opposite. I work on a team that maintains a digital catalog, and a lot of what we write is about taking in asset- and metadata files, asynchronously processing them, and then publishing that to a denormalized read-optimized data store. We often joke that we mostly take data from 'over here' and put it 'over there'.

All our stuff is in Java, and honestly, if you use Lombok to squeeze out the boilerplate, and a decent dependency injection framework like Guice or Dagger, modern Java really isn't so bad. Streams are clunky but they get the job done. We use Jackson a lot to serialize/deserialize Java pojos to JSON and XML, which is pretty seamless for us so far. The Optional class is again clunky, but it works well enough.

The thing for us though is that the problems we spend most time solving are just not really related to the language we write it in. The hard problems are much more around things like operations (cd/ci, metrics, alarms, canaries), performance (latency, load, etc.) and just the nuts and bolts of the business logic (what type should this new field be? what values can it take? how do we plumb this through to downstream system X owned by team Y? etc.)

I honestly wouldn't want to have to write this stuff in Python for a simple reason: I don't think I could live without static typing, which is a fantastic tool when you need to manage a large code base written by multiple people over multiple years. I can make a change in some package, do a dry-run compile of every system that uses it, and then see what needs updating. It gives me certain guarantees about data integrity right at compile time, which is super helpful when you're doing data conversion.

But hey, different jobs, different tools. Glad you found something you're happy with.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#514

Post by continuational »

blub wrote: post #367
kbenson wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that supposed to help someone? I fail to see how telling someone "just ignore the stuff that irks you that you have to spend 40+ hours a week dealing with. You are overly sensitive and your concerns are irrelevant" helps anyone . Even if it was true, it was delivered in such a ham-fisted manner that I can't imagine anyone taking it to heart.

I sometimes have a tendency to focus only on the negative aspects of some things, while ignoring that all in all, those things are fine. I don't think I'm alone in that, certainly not in our line of work. A call to "snap out of it" seems that it can help in such situations. Python is not a programming language that should make people burn out or angry. Very few languages should be capable of that, so I think this iss…

The programming language is one of the central tools though, the very language in which you express programs.

If you don't care about that, caring about "building good software" feels hollow.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#515

Post by ModestasJ »

I think the growth of Python is mainly due to it being a popular beginner language. Like they have a graph in the article that shows the number of question view per month and Python is dominating. But, of course, it will be. For Python to eat up the world, it needs to start being the primary language for real world programming languages, but it is not.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#516

Post by saagarjha »

blattimwind wrote: post #324
dev_dull wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t even work in all situations. What if the system requires development packages? What if it’s a different OS or architecture? Packaging is a nightmare.

What if you are on Linux and your binary requires a slightly newer version of glibc for some reason etc. Static, portable binaries on Linux are hard.

Why would your binary require glibc if it’s statically linked?

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#517

Post by Chris2048 »

wasnthere wrote: post #435
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…

saddened to see this poorly constructed comment berating python at the top of this thread. the author seems to have some personal issues with the language given the generally frustrated tone of the comment. the entire comment could have just been 1 line "We need official support for a modern package management system, from the Python org itself." which would be consumed as constructive feedback by all readers with th…

> the author seems to have some personal issues with the language given the generally frustrated tone of the comment

What "personal issues" do you think the author has? The frustrated tone comes from the frustrations the author explicitly outlines; unless you think this shouldn't be so, you are turning this into an ad-hom.

> the entire comment could have just been 1 line "We need official support for a modern package management system, from the Python org itself."

Why? because you don't appreciate the detail on why we need such a thing? These issues certainly get in the way of producing production apps; not in the sense that they make it impossible, but they make the process harder and slower than it needs to be.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#518

Post by trilila »

poooogles wrote: post #508
trilila wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh nice, you have two frameworks. Well, whatever suits your fixed mindset.

>Oh nice, you have two frameworks. Well, whatever suits your fixed mindset. Let me see, you've got Django, DRF, Flask, Flask-Restful, Flask-Restplus, Flask-API, sanic, pyramid, Cornice, hug, falcon, eve, bottle, tornado, aiohttp, vibora, weppy, starlette... Those are just some that I've picked out of my head.

Most of those enumerations are Flask, and the others are basically useless.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#520

Post by orangeshark »

Ensorceled wrote: post #459
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?

I'm pretty sure this didn't exist in the 80's and 90's ...

So did pip, according to Wikipedia[0], it came out in 2011. Did python have a different package manager before this?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pip_(package_manager)

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