Python Is Eating the World • Hacker News Board

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#611

Post by euler_angles » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:34 PM UTC

willtim wrote: post #608

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…

To understand the hate, you have to realise that no one likes being forced into using a particular technology. Especially one that is more of a lowest common denominator and ignores much of the progress in programming language research over the last 40-50 years (e.g. expressive static type systems, and Python still markets itself as "strongly typed").

I go with what helps me get work done. I have a feeling many people are the same. Python lets me be productive in a crazy variety of tasks and mostly gets out of my way when I do so.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#612

Post by checktheorder » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

perakojotgenije wrote: post #499

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…

Don't forget COBOL

A hundred thousand years from now, when the Terran Empire's Dyson Swarms are ubiquitous throughout the Orion Arm, the relativistic generation-ships of the Andromeda Colonization Fleet have set out on their multi-million-year journey across the intergalactic deeps, and the World Computers housing the Great Intelligences serve the daily needs of quadrillions of citizens, there will still be job ads for COBOL programmers.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#613

Post by KirinDave » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

CameronNemo wrote: post #271

p1esk wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you put in as much time as you have learning Python, then the answer is probably yes.

As much as I love the languages you mentioned: I think it's a major weakness of them that they don't have the linear algebra libraries integrated such that you can do this the same way Python does.

There are a lot of reasons why this is.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#614

Post by dharmab » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:39 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #569

inoop wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stuf…

I know that this is not strictly static typing but in Python 3.5 they added an optional type system. See https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html

We have the typing enforced as mandatory for all new code in our codebase (and have progressively been retrofitting it tonokd code as we touch it). It's saved our asses many, many times.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#615

Post by Cpoll » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:40 PM UTC

sourcesmith wrote: post #591

Cpoll wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming in the large without type safety is a fool’s errand. Programming in the large without tests is a fool's errand. Type systems don't guarantee correctness.

No but they help. You can find figures of a 15%-38% reduction in bugs for TypeScript versus JavaScript. So that does not consider the additional effect of strong versus weak typing.

I'm in agreement with you about Typescript, but JS has other deficiencies that contribute to typing issues.

Anecdotally, I'm frequently enough bitten by type issues in JavaScript, but I can't recall very many in Python. Certainly not 15-38%, perhaps 1%.

Which furthers my point (for my set of circumstances): I find the majority of my bugs when I'm writing tests.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#616

Post by KirinDave » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

goto11 wrote: post #339

KirinDave wrote: post #93

Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious... I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future…

> folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future barely-trained developers who will ostensibly have to come and work with my code. It seems you are really complaining about having to write code which is maintainable by others than yourself?

Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.

A corporate point of view is than any programmer should be interchangeable with the minimum amount of fuss. I understand why someone building an injury organization has a responsibility to think about the future.

But I confess that sometimes I feel very demoralized when an organization implicitly tells me that my years is study and my ongoing self-education and practice is all meanless Because in principle someone fresh out of college should be able to take over my project with the two week handoff and a few docs.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#617

Post by willtim » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

euler_angles wrote: post #611

willtim wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To understand the hate, you have to realise that no one likes being forced into using a particular technology. Especially one that is more of a lowest common denominator and ignores much of the progress in programming language research over the last 40-50 years (e.g. expressive static type systems, and Python still markets itself as "strongly typed").

I go with what helps me get work done. I have a feeling many people are the same. Python lets me be productive in a crazy variety of tasks and mostly gets out of my way when I do so.

In my industry, the companies that have standardised on Python and consequently now have large Python codebases are not very productive environments anymore. Perhaps they were once, for the first few people, in the first few months. It's no surprise that the Python community has now started to try and retrofit types.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#618

Post by KirinDave » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:45 PM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #309

KirinDave wrote: post #93

Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious... I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future…

This is the top comment? Not very useful.

Sorry. I'm as surprise as you are. I figured I'd take a small hit the karma and I feel better about getting this off my chest.

This comment is more highly rated than some links I've submitted that made it to the front page.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#619

Post by rowanG077 » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:45 PM UTC

rixed wrote: post #586

Cpoll wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming in the large without type safety is a fool’s errand. Programming in the large without tests is a fool's errand. Type systems don't guarantee correctness.

Exactly! While tests, on the other hand, totally guarantee correctness. I don't get why people try to use sophisticated types systems to prove software, when writing and maintaining tests is so superior, and funnier too!

What? Tests don't guarantee correctness. Sophisticated type systems can prove correctness. See Idris for instance.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#620

Post by void445be54d48a » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 1:47 PM UTC

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…

Sounds like the author of the article has never been involved in the Javascript community.