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Python Is Eating the World

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#631

Post by SantalBlush »

upofadown wrote: post #543
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…

Well I actually feel betrayed... Python 1.4 was an awesomely simple programming environment and I pretty much immediately fell in love with it. Then features were added. Now it is a whole home improvement store full of kitchen sinks. I think that programming is a sort of theological process. Popular languages attract ideas. Unfortunately, in the case of Python, those ideas were not effectively filtered and now we hav…

>I think that programming is a sort of theological process. Popular languages attract ideas. Unfortunately, in the case of Python, those ideas were not effectively filtered and now we have an expression of as many ideas as can possibly fit. The ultimate design by committee...

It's funny, a lot of people hate on Elm for the exact opposite reasons: one person dictating the language's direction and removing features. I suppose a nice balance could be struck between the two ends of the spectrum.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#632

Post by klibertp »

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!

Both static type systems and unit testing are just tools which are supposed to help programmers to deliver higher quality software.

Both static type systems and unit testing have their disadvantages. For static type systems, you sometimes need to bend backward to make it accept your code and it's not very useful before the code grows large enough. For unit tests, even if you have 100% test coverage, it doesn't mean that you're safe - underlying libraries may behave in unexpected ways and the test data input won't ever cover the whole range of values that the code expects to work. Integration tests have the same problem, the prepared input represents just a few cases, plus they are generally harder to run so they are run less frequently.

So, both tools are useful but they aren't solutions for all the problems in programming. Static type systems have the advantage of being checked without running any code, which should be much quicker than running the tests. Static type systems become more useful as you increase the precision of types and the amount of annotated code in the project. When used correctly, they provide certain guarantees about the code which you can rely on and they are used to restrict the domain (set of possible inputs) of type-checked procedures and classes. This means that you can write fewer unit tests because you don't have to worry about certain conditions which the type system guards against (static guarantee of something never being `null` is quite nice).

Anyway, I think that both static type systems and tests are great tools and they can and should be used together if you value the quality of the code you write. This is getting easier thanks to gradual type systems (optional type annotations like in Python or JS) which allow you to get some of the static guarantees without insisting on everything around being typed. With tests and mypy (in Python) you're much better off in terms of code quality than if you used just one of them. I see no reason not to use them both.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#633

Post by sweeneyrod »

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").

> and Python still markets itself as "strongly typed" What's wrong with that? It is strongly typed (doesn't coerce everything like Javascript) just not statically typed (objects have types but variables don't).

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#634

Post by jhbadger »

fellellor wrote: post #507
PikachuEXE wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many people still "love" ruby I never liked Python from day 1 of my work (I am Ruby on Rails Dev for my job) Wish there are more useful projects written in ruby :)

I am trying to find a place in the industry - again, starting from RoR. I absolutely love Ruby. And all this talk of "Ruby dying" makes me feel sad. The rational thing to do is to move on, and learn something popular, like node.js but the more I see Ruby in action, I just can't pull myself away from it. I had managed to get a job as a Java developer a long time ago, but at that time all I could do was barely write to…

Ruby's future may actually not be Ruby itself. Probably the major problem with Ruby is its performance, which is slow even compared to other interpreted languages. While I'm not sure it is really production ready yet, Crystal is very interesting -- it's a native compiled statically typed language that nevertheless feels very much like Ruby. Check it out if you haven't.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#635

Post by Barrin92 »

nighthawk648 wrote: post #529
Ensorceled wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in so many languages and environments in my career and Django/python/virtualenv has to be one of the least painful. I tried Rails which is very similar but feels "inside out", a good friend of mine loves Rails and hates Django and has the exact same feeling about Django. That's kind of my point, you may like other environments better, such as React/Node/NPM but that doesn't mean Python is a horror show. I…

How stable is python to run a full trading / quantitative algorithm on? I feel there are benefits for every language. I am just curious if super stable and scalable conditions can be met on python.

>How stable is python to run a full trading / quantitative algorithm on?

JP Morgan operates a ~30 million LOC Python platform for trading and analytics. (related talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk)

Yes, there are very, very large working python codebases in fields out there that demand correctness. I'm honestly getting tired of the static typing circlejerk that has entered the industry.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#636

Post by ImprovedSilence »

Ensorceled wrote: post #582
ken wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to learn Fortran IV for my first job. Am I allowed to hate Python? Are you assuming everyone complaining here is young, and this is their first language? Consider that maybe they're complaining because they've used older languages they liked more. Often, not having a feature is preferable to having a feature designed or implemented poorly.

Sure! I dislike all sorts of languages and environments. That wasn't my point. My point is if you had to write Fortran IV using an IBM 32xx terminal you wouldn't be quite so hyperbolic about modern Python. Unless you are claiming you would rather return to writing Fortran IV than use Python because you like Fortran IV better, in which case I'm very confused.

Just because languages were more of a PITA in the past, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pick out faults of current languages and search for new/better solutions...

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#637

Post by uncletaco »

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.

Python is the first language that clicked with my brain as well and in college I often used it to prototype homework algorithms before translating them into the language I needed to actually submit my work in. I have nothing but love for python as a language.

At the same time even when I used it heavily I never saw it as anything more than a scripting language to sit in front of some tool that was written in a language I couldn't be fucked to learn at that moment (numpy and scipy were used heavily throughout my college career).

If I'm being honest I don't understand how anyone could get as worked up about a language as the people in this thread have. At the end of the day most of us are still writing unportable imperative code that runs like shit. Maybe blaming language is how we cope with our own failure as engineers.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#638

Post by bregma »

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 cut my teeth in FORTRAN IV (on RSX-11M). I lived through the archie days of uuencoded fragments to build my C environment, supplemented by DECUS tapes. Those were good old days.

I use Python 3 these days for a lot of stuff. It's pretty good.

These are better days. We all have complaints, but on the whole, things are not too bad.

I think for the most part that when nothing meets your expectations, it may be that your expectations need to be adjusted.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#639

Post by vcolano »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #116

Python is not eating the world so much as becoming the new Excel. It has a pretty easy learning curve for people who are not programmers. It has pretty good built in tooling. A domain expert, who is not a programmer, can put together pretty impressive models and visualizations relatively quickly. However, like with Excel, there are serious issues regarding reproducibility, performance, and long term maintenance.

That's all good and fine until you want this model you built with tooling you barely understand to be deployed. Then your gross data scientist spaghetti code gets handed off to some one who actually has the skills to turn it into a robust deployable code base.

I love that Python has brought a lot of people into programming and that it makes it relatively easy for domain experts to do advanced analytics. However, another side of me wishes that there were a less user friendly language being used for data analysis so that it would force all of these people to actually learn to code half-way decently.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#640

Post by hydandata »

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…

"It is a poor workman who blames his tools — the good man gets on with the job, given what he's got, and gets the best answer he can."

—Richard W. Hamming[0]

I have rarely "chosen" to use Python at work, but it has never failed to get the job done.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2041981/

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