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Python Is Eating the World

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#701

Post by CydeWeys »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #695
CydeWeys wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some rational "hate" for Python then. I just returned to Python for the first time in a little while to collaborate on a side project and ran into a few tricky-to-debug errors that caused a fair bit of lost time. Know what the errors were? In one case, I was iterating over the contents of what was supposed to be a list, but in some rare circumstances could instead be a string. Instead of throwing a type error,…

Your 2nd error isn't possible in Python, so I'm not sure what you did there. Regarding the first, sure, it is a bug that was annoying to catch. But, having an `Iterable` interface in Python is also really neat and useful if used responsibly. If you're programming regularly in Python, you are accustomed to the tradeoffs that come with a dynamic programming language and no static types, and you can still avoid issues l…

I didn't explain the second one well. Here's some exact code.

  group_keys = ...
  if not isinstance(group_keys, list):
    groups_keys = [ group_keys ]
So rather than listifying the non-list variable, it was creating a new variable. The cause of this bug is that Python doesn't distinguish between declaring new variables and overwriting existing ones.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#702

Post by eropple »

coldtea wrote: post #658
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…

> 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. So, basically, if you go out of your way not to use Java as is, Java is not so bad for the task?

Well, sure. Or just use Kotlin.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#703

Post by CydeWeys »

winstonewert wrote: post #688
CydeWeys wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some rational "hate" for Python then. I just returned to Python for the first time in a little while to collaborate on a side project and ran into a few tricky-to-debug errors that caused a fair bit of lost time. Know what the errors were? In one case, I was iterating over the contents of what was supposed to be a list, but in some rare circumstances could instead be a string. Instead of throwing a type error,…

> And another one, I typoed a variable name as groups_keys instead of group_keys (or vice-versa, I don't remember). Instead of just throwing an error, Python happily went along with it, used an uninitialized value, and then all the logic broke. Python doesn't have uninitialized values, it throws NameError when you try to access a variable that hasn't been set. So I don't see how this could have happened.

Other way around, the typo was in the name of the variable being set, so it defined a new one instead of modifying the existing one.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#704

Post by kiliantics »

billfruit wrote: post #644
mruts wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s my long list on why Python is terrible: 1) No pattern matching. In 2019, this is just unacceptable. Pattern matching is so fundamental to good FP style that without it, it becomes almost impossible to write good and clean code. 2) Statement vs expression distinction. There’s no need for this and it just crippled the language. Why can’t I use a conditional inside an assignment? Why can’t I nest conditions insid…

What exactly is Kerala library for, never heard of it before?

I believe they must mean Keras

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#705

Post by [deleted] »

winstonewert wrote: post #688
CydeWeys wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some rational "hate" for Python then. I just returned to Python for the first time in a little while to collaborate on a side project and ran into a few tricky-to-debug errors that caused a fair bit of lost time. Know what the errors were? In one case, I was iterating over the contents of what was supposed to be a list, but in some rare circumstances could instead be a string. Instead of throwing a type error,…

> And another one, I typoed a variable name as groups_keys instead of group_keys (or vice-versa, I don't remember). Instead of just throwing an error, Python happily went along with it, used an uninitialized value, and then all the logic broke. Python doesn't have uninitialized values, it throws NameError when you try to access a variable that hasn't been set. So I don't see how this could have happened.

[deleted]

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#706

Post by mnky9800n »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #695
CydeWeys wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some rational "hate" for Python then. I just returned to Python for the first time in a little while to collaborate on a side project and ran into a few tricky-to-debug errors that caused a fair bit of lost time. Know what the errors were? In one case, I was iterating over the contents of what was supposed to be a list, but in some rare circumstances could instead be a string. Instead of throwing a type error,…

Your 2nd error isn't possible in Python, so I'm not sure what you did there. Regarding the first, sure, it is a bug that was annoying to catch. But, having an `Iterable` interface in Python is also really neat and useful if used responsibly. If you're programming regularly in Python, you are accustomed to the tradeoffs that come with a dynamic programming language and no static types, and you can still avoid issues l…

Maybe they could write unit tests to make sure what's being passed is lists and strings. But that's probably crazy.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#707

Post by bpicolo »

astonex wrote: post #42
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…

>Most people just cross their fingers and hope dependencies don't change Is there anything wrong with pip freeze > requirements.txt and then pip install -r requirements.txt ? This would install the exact versions

It's not functional for library dependencies, where you still need to manage the setup.py instead. Only useful for end-user application dependencies.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#708

Post by ubu7737 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #234
kazinator wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best, brightest and most informed/experienced people who do not think it is a good idea for significant whitepace to be the determiner of syntactic nesting do not hold that position because they would like to inflict badly formatted code on their maintainers. You've invented a stupendously silly strawman.

That's a stupendously anonymous appeal to authority you've made there, and it's unclear what argument you're actually saying without some explicit parenthesis around all those deeply nested phrases, or some kind of grammatical diagram. Can you please restate how we disagree in a few simple sentences? Are there any names or links or citations or concrete examples you could add to support your argument and help us resp…

I just don't think Winer should be used as an authority for anything like this. What he pioneered was "just make it work for the user" solutions from a usability perspective, and not from an engineering perspective.

Winer part in the XML-RPC and SOAP outcomes was a source of misery for developers in the early part of this century. MORE was neat because it had a place on the Macintosh System 6 platform, when there was literally nothing else of its kind. What did MORE evolve into later? Nothing.

Winer has long been an advocate of "the semantic Web", which is a user-focused idea of what's essentially an engineering problem. The semantic Web was/is a dead-end and in its time it led to a great many stupid uses of HTTP.

Winer can be celebrated as an advocate for users but not as a great engineer.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#709

Post by sidlls »

dagw wrote: post #289
sidlls wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conda doesn't really solve the packaging problems of python. It can make them worse if conda doesn't have a package you need.

Conda supports pip installing into a conda environment if there is no conda package.

Yes, exactly my point: then you have to potentially deal with conflicting dependencies between pip and conda packages. This happens and it's a pain to deal with.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#710

Post by pytester »

CydeWeys wrote: post #685
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…

Here's some rational "hate" for Python then. I just returned to Python for the first time in a little while to collaborate on a side project and ran into a few tricky-to-debug errors that caused a fair bit of lost time. Know what the errors were? In one case, I was iterating over the contents of what was supposed to be a list, but in some rare circumstances could instead be a string. Instead of throwing a type error,…

>In one case, I was iterating over the contents of what was supposed to be a list, but in some rare circumstances could instead be a string. Instead of throwing a type error, Python happily went along with it, and iterated over each character in the string individually.

I've been using python for about 13 years professionally and I wrote up a list of "things I wish python would fix but I think probably never will" and treating strings as iterable lists of characters was on there.

I've seen this bug multiple times and the fix is relatively easy - just to make strings by default non-iterable and use "string.chars" (or something) if you really want to iterate through the chars.

Nonetheless, I still love the language and wouldn't use anything else.

>Instead of just throwing an error, Python happily went along with it, used an uninitialized value, and then all the logic broke.

This one gets caught by linters - unfortunately 90% of most python linters spit out rule violations which aren't important which drowns out stuff like this in the noise.

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