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Reasons Python Sucks

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Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#71

Post by lmm »

colanderman wrote: post #11
CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #3

A number of these points seem like reasonable opinions to have. But two which had me questioning the breadth of the author's experience were "Most programming languages pass function parameters by value." and "In every other language, arrays are called 'arrays'. In Python, they are called 'lists'." To the author: 1. Java, JavaScript and C# all have types which are passed by reference. (They also have types which are…

Python (and Java) do not pass anything by reference. They pass by pointer-value. (If they passed by reference, you could change to which value a caller's variable was bound, like you can in C++).

Those languages use references rather than pointers (that is, their referring-things do not support arithmetic), so any name for what they do that involves "pointer" is a poor one.

The distinction between passing the value of a reference being used by the caller and passing a reference to the caller's stack is so rarely important or useful that there's no consensus terminology for it. The distinction that's actually relevant and useful is whether, when we write f(a), f receives the (thing we would call the) value of a or a reference to the value of a (and in particular whether f can change the value of a). In Python, f can change the value of a (that is to say, the thing Python programmers understand to be the value of a); therefore Python is pass by reference as the term is usually understood (and certainly any term for its call style that uses "value" is more misleading than calling it "pass by reference").

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#72

Post by notacoward »

sytelus wrote: post #6

Many of the reasons authors states are quite silly. Personally I don’t like the huge perf hits everywhere you look. For example, a bool in Python takes whopping 24 bytes! Multi threading is a giant mess due to GIL that apparently no one can get rid of. Things like true static variables are missing. Import behavior differences for programs and modules is baffling. Lambda is intentionally kept under powered (ex. no gro…

I encourage you to expand on these excellent points in a blog post. It would be about 100x better than the OP.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#73

Post by SamWhited »

I tend to agree with the author (although not with a few of his specific reasons) that Python is terrible. Everywhere I've ever been that used Python they've claimed it was to make development faster, but mostly we just fought with bugs that cropped up around tests that were too aggressively mocked and weren't testing things, or stuff that somehow was in the wrong scope because someones editor was using the wrong type of whitespace, etc. And don't get me started how on every single code review I had to force people to write unit tests that wouldn't have to exist if there was a static type system to effectively be those tests for us.

That being said, if your alternative is C or PHP suck it up and stick with Python. There is no situation in which PHP is the appropriate tool for the job, and as simple as C is and as much as I love it you're much more likely to introduce weird bugs and create broken software if you're using C. Python at least has some basic memory safety, even if its tooling and versioning is all horribly broken. As a user of software (and also a devloper): please stop writing things in C and related languages, if I keep seeing segfaults in popular products with huge QA teams behind them, I'm going to go insane.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#74

Post by lmm »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #67

>By the same means, Python has distinct silos of code for each version. And the community keeps dragging along the old versions. So you end up with a lot of old, dead Python code that keeps getting dragged along because nobody wants to spend the time porting it to the latest version. As far as I can tell, nobody creates new code for Python2, but we drag it along because nobody's ported the needed code to Python3.x. A…

> Does this author think a minor version update should immediately EOL the previous version (3.5,3.6)?

More likely the author thinks minor version updates should be backward compatible, like they are in virtually every other language? In most languages you'd be able to uninstall 3.5 when you installed 3.6, because you'd be confident that all your 3.5 code would keep working in 3.6.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#75

Post by drugme »

If I have the choice between using some pre-existing Python code or rewriting it in C, I'd rather rewrite it in C.

Go ahead, get your jollies and rewrite it in C.

But will anyone else be able to read it and maintain it? That's the core issue.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#76

Post by dheerendra73 »

Reason 5: Nomenclature

That is problem with every single programming language out there.

- Python array are not called arrays because they are not array in C/C++ sense. It's like saying in C++ lists are called vector and not lists/ArrayList etc.

- Python library naming is inconsistent like PyGame, Numpy etc. Most of these mentioned libraries are third party libraries. How can a language enforce naming convention or documentation of a library?

- If you pick all softwares and libraries for all languages, you can't guess uses for most of them just by name. What are WireShark, TimeMachine, ReactJS, Boost, Armadillo etc?

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#77

Post by blattimwind »

dagw wrote: post #31
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #7

the self argument for methods/method calls is stressful (having to define self for methods and having to call a method via self); also the fact that you need to check if dictionary key exists, else you get an exception when trying to get the keys value. Also ':' at the end of each line. I always forget at least one of these. You didn't have any of these goodies in good old perl (sob, sob) (wow, this one got flagged p…

you need to check if dictionary key exists, else you get an exception when trying to get the keys value. What should be the correct behavior when accessing a key that doesn't exists? If you want a specific default value when a key doesn't exist you can use the get() method. Also ':' at the end of each line. What do you mean? You don't need ':' at the end of each line, only at the start of a block (basically anywhere…

> What should be the correct behavior when accessing a key that doesn't exists?

Undefined behaviour, i.e. the JIT generates code to 3D print a clay golem on your desktop that sets your village ablaze.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#78

Post by lmm »

faizshah wrote: post #27

My top 3 criticisms as an intermediate (~5 months of study) python programmer: 1. Importing behavior is ridiculous: https://chrisyeh96.github.io/2017/08/08/definitive-guide-pyt... 2. Python libraries' documentation leave a lot to be desired (compared to good javadocs). Just because your language is dynamically typed doesn't mean you don't need to describe what the expected shape of a parameter should be. 3. Static me…

> Static method? @staticmethod

> Static variable? declare it outside of your methods but inside your class

Sounds like you're still thinking in Java :). A static method is rarely what you want (and if you do you can put it on the class like for variables); functions are first-class so you can just put them in your module.

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#79

Post by t_fatus »

I'm quite surprised by some of these reasons:

- 1 & 2: just use virtualenv, js has its own version manager too (nvm) which is very useful. This is one of the reason why only python2.7 is included in OSX, since most of seasoned python devs not use it. usr/include vs usr/local/include in cpp are not easier to use / understand.

- 3: my opinion is this forces you to write readable code, in which you don't have to ask yourself where the scope starts / ends

- 4: since import use dot notation you just need to follow the path until you find a file and in this file the corresponding function. Or read the doc. Or use an IDE with autocompletion. Looking a .h files in c sometimes lead to using a wrong function judging only by its name.

- 5: They are called "list" because they are lists, not arrays in a C sense (size not fixed)

- 6: multiline strings are a mess indeed, but python3 handles them all in utf-8 (one of the reasons why it broke backward compatibility)

- 7: just like js, making them 2 of the 3 most used languages. Understand the difference between pointers and references is harder to grasp for a beginner to just remind modifying the arguments of one method is dangerous unless you know what you're doing

- 8: there is the from ... import ... which allows you to avoid this while being explicit

Re: Reasons Python Sucks

#80

Post by b_tterc_p »

jdblair wrote: post #32
superasn wrote: post #19

I too have tried it many times mainly because of all the great ML libs for python but each time I dreaded using it for Reason #3 (Syntax). Using indents for blocks just seemed unintuitive and error prone to me. But I dismissed it because all the programming languages I've worked with have had curly braces so maybe the reason for my discomfort was that it was unfamiliar.

Only in Python can I commit a whitespace-only change that results in a 10x speed improvement.

Care to explain? I’m not sure where this would work without fundamentally changing the meaning of the code
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