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Python Is Eating the World

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Re: Python Is Eating the World

#91

Post by ajmurmann »

hyperpallium wrote: post #57
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…

Is there a model dependency management system for some other language that addresses all these issues? Dependency hell is everywhere.

Rust's cargo, JS's yarn and the grand daddy of them all Ruby's bundler address all these issues. Even newer versions of Gradle support a workflow where you specify the versions you know you want and just on everything else, including transitive dependencies, down.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#92

Post by adrianN »

lwansbrough wrote: post #82

Recently was trying to convert Python to C#... there are few things that are as absolutely incomprehensible as a Python programmer being clever with numpy. I gave up on the conversion. Perhaps this is a point for Python’s flexibility, but I’d say it’s just a waste. Here’s the code. Try to convert this to any C style language. mins = X.min(axis=0) maxs = X.max(axis=0) idxs = np.random.choice(range(self.dim), self.dim-…

Try converting typical Matlab code to a C-style language and you'll run into similar problems. That's just what you get when your base language isn't all that fast but you have a fast numerics library that allows you to do clever things with arrays and matrices.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#93

Post by KirinDave »

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 barely-trained developers who will ostensibly have to come and work with my code. Every moment working with python (and that infernal pep-8 linter insisting 80 characters is a sensible standard in 2019) increases my burnout by 100x.

I try to remind myself that we're trying to make the industry less exclusive and more welcoming to new developers and "old" isn't necessarily "good" (in fact, probably the opposite), but damn I just don't understand it.

It used to be that I could focus on other languages (Erlang, Nemerle, F#, Haskell, Ocaml, even C++) and sort of balm myself. But now, I can't even overcome the sinking feeling as I read the Julia statistics book that I'm going to be dragged back to Python kicking and screaming in the morning, so why even bother?

And frustratingly: it's one of the few languages with decent linear algebra libraries. And that means it's one of the few languages with good ML and statistics support. So it's very hard not to use it because when you want to cobble together something like a Bayesian model things like PyMC or Edward actually give you performance that's obnoxiously difficult to reproduce.

This is what the industry wants and evidently a lot of people are okay with it, but to me it's misery and I can't work out why people seem to like it so much.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#94

Post by adrianN »

pbreit wrote: post #12

Considering Python can power the largest web sites (Netflix, Instagram), I don’t understand why there’s so much use of much more complicated platform/languages (eg java, .net)? Note: I am an amateur which is likely the reason for my ignorance.

Python is pretty slow. If you can rewrite your stuff in Java or Go or something else that runs faster you can save half your servers at least. At a certain size that's a lot of money.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#95

Post by simula67 »

In my opinion, the biggest problem facing Python is still concurrency. The mitigation efforts still look to me like Perl's 'bolted on' implementation of object orientation. Python should have gotten rid of the GIL during the 2 to 3 transition. It may have also been an opportune moment to introduce optional typing and maybe even optional manual memory management, making it useful to develop almost all kinds of software. Write a WASM backend and it could have even been used for front end development.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#96

Post by atoav »

hyperpallium wrote: post #57
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…

Is there a model dependency management system for some other language that addresses all these issues? Dependency hell is everywhere.

> Dependency hell is everywhere.

Excuse me, but as a long time Python user I have to disagree. I started using Rust two years ago and Rust’s dependency managment is easily the best thing I ever saw (keep in mind that I didn’t see everything, so there is a chance there are better things out there).

The project-/dependency-manager Cargo¹ is more “pythonic” than anything Python ever came up with and where others mumbled ”dependency hell is everywhere” the Rust people seem to have thought something like: ”there must be a way to do this properly”.

The whole thing gives me hope for Python, but angers me everytime I start a new python project. Poetry is good, but there should be an official way to do this.

It saddens me to see, that some people seem to just have given up on dependency managment alltogether and declared it unsolvable (which it is not, and probably never has been).

¹: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/index.html

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#97

Post by aaron_m04 »

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…

I write python professionally and honestly, who cares about the 80 character limit? Just ignore it! :)

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#98

Post by adev_ »

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…

Solution ?

Use Nix.

> nix-shell -p python3Packages.numpy python3Packages.my_important_package

It solves every problem you quoted before.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#99

Post by KirinDave »

aaron_m04 wrote: post #97
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…

I write python professionally and honestly, who cares about the 80 character limit? Just ignore it! :)

I've never worked at a place where the prevailing python culture wasn't to set the linter on kill and just let go wild.

Re: Python Is Eating the World

#100

Post by nikofeyn »

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…

i fully agree with you. it has a stubbornness about it and not in a good way like the stubbornness you might find in lisp, scheme, and sml derivatives. i have had to write python on only a few side projects, but it was miserable, as you say. not only is the language all over the place and embarrassingly slow, the ecosystem is as well. i tried getting an application someone left when they left running on windows 10, and it was basically a null effort without a complete rewrite, upgrade to 3.x, and upgrading/replacing GUI libraries.

if i had to write python as a day job, i would quit. i have said it before, but python is the new c++, helping people everywhere write brittle, unmaintainable code.

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