61–70 of 125 posts
I have developed insanely complicated software with Python that works pretty well. If you expect to find Java or C in Python you are looking at the wrong place.
And now, of course, it's deprecated because you wrote it in a version of Python that's no longer in support or used a library that hasn't been (or maybe won't be) ported to 3.11.
What's left are people who don't need that performance, which is sometimes me and is when I still am happy to use Python for something, and people who do need that performance, but don't know it. Those are the ones who get into trouble.
I do wish that the Python developer community would be more open about the fact that Python performance is really quite bad in many cases and that while there are some tools to peck around the edges, it is still fundamentally a low performance language, things like NumPy notwithstanding (it is, ultimately, still a "peck around the edges" tool, even if the particular edge it pecks it does extremely well, but that only makes the performance delta worse when you fall out of its accelerated code path). I feel like maybe back in the 200Xs the community as a whole was more open to that. Now "Python is slow" is perceived by the community as an attack. Maybe because the ones who did understand what that issue was are mostly gone.
But in the 2020s, yes, Python ought to be straight-up eliminated from many tasks people want to do today on straight-up performance grounds. Overcoming a ~40x disadvantage in the single core era was sometimes tough, but often doable. But nowadays basically that gets multiplied by each core on the system, and overcoming a multi-hundred-factor disadvantage is just not worth your time IF that is a level of performance you need. Python is nice, but not nice enough to pay for multiple-hundred-factor performance penalties. Static languages have come a long way since 1995.
I wish people could be honest and say they don't care for some language or framework or OS for personal or aesthetic reasons, rather than having to round it up to being objectively bad, but then I suppose nobody probably would click on "I don't like Python and have got some nits to pick". Oh and he just says what is supposed to be quiet part at the end: >And, not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can code Pyt…
Yeah, this kind of hyperbolic headline article repeating mostly dead-horse arguments is just low-effort click farming, not a serious contribution to the discussion of anything. All it adds to what is a well-trodden debate is…factual errors, like the claim that Python prominently features “lazy evaluation” (while, as in any language, you can arrange laziness in Python, it is very much eager normally.)
My experience with Python can be summed up as: it's tempting to start something with it, since it has such low (initial) friction and hey, "this is just a small throwaway project anyway". Months or years later, it's a beast, hard to understand or refactor, full of holes and pitfalls, and Python's terrible tooling doesn't help either. And I never learn the lesson!
Python is a gravity pool attracting unexperienced programmers. And very often (in my experience) , it shows. Lack of static typing is nothing in comparison with lack of common sense and unwillingness to learn ("why force oneself ? The job market swallows everything anyway") .
I have never found any language community to lack that, and if anything its more where people have lots of experience exclusively in one language than with inexperienced programmers picking up their first (who tend to, by nature, have a willingness to learn, even if they have a lack of the common base of experience that gets labelled “common sense”.)
Yes, pretty much agree with this word for word. It is very, very difficult to refactor a python application in any sort of reliable way. The standard way of error handling in python appears to be to present the user with a stack trace. Very user friendly (not!). Now people will say that, for instance, mypy can help with this. That is true but since projects can be started without type checking chances are that your p…
What do you expect it to do? Silently fail and move on?
I wish people could be honest and say they don't care for some language or framework or OS for personal or aesthetic reasons, rather than having to round it up to being objectively bad, but then I suppose nobody probably would click on "I don't like Python and have got some nits to pick". Oh and he just says what is supposed to be quiet part at the end: >And, not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can code Pyt…
The ecosystem is the real plus, of course. But the language is a headache for this. I agree with the "false economy" angle. I would happily trade the "agility" of dynamic "gluing" with some kind of real type safety, human-readable error messages and performance[0].
[0] - hiding C in Python's clothes doesn't count :)
> And, not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can code Python but not Go (or another decent programming language), you probably have no business writing software for a living. I know it sounds harsh and I apologize for that, but writing software is a profession and hence you should have the knowledge, skill, and experience to use professional tools. Part of the profession of software engineering is maintaining…
Let me ask the obvious question. Why hasn’t the go community, of professional software engineers built an even richer ecosystem of libraries? Is it ennui, incompetence, or attitude? As Go came from Google, is that the attitude was, “I am a professional I’ll just write my own code to solve X”, rather than considering building a library that others can use? Are libraries harder to build in Go? Is adoption of libraries…
Python is a gravity pool attracting unexperienced programmers. And very often (in my experience) , it shows. Lack of static typing is nothing in comparison with lack of common sense and unwillingness to learn ("why force oneself ? The job market swallows everything anyway") .
Whenever some project I find doesn't just work, or works and then a few weeks later stops working, it always seems to be python. People cannot semver properly (even python itself? or is that some programs work on 3.9 and not 3.10 the programmers fault again?) and also cannot lock their dependency versions properly. Same problem that can happen to nodejs code, and yet, I rarely see such basic failures there.
I also just don't understand why anyone would even want to use python, anyway. I've tried to debug python code, or write new python code, but I could never get into it, nor was it easy to read code others had written. Whitespace sensitivity? Special __ files for package purposes? No JIT (no idea why pypy is a separate thing rather than rolled in)? I just don't see the advantage over JS which seems to do everything better. It even has the benefit of being syntactically intuitive for users of other languages, and typescript really has saved JS from chaos. It's fine to be different from C syntactically, but it I don't see the benefit of python to justify that syntax taking up another spot in my brain I could use for learning rust or something.