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Why Python Is Terrible

josvisser.substack.com

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Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#91

Post by jerf »

IOT_Apprentice wrote: post #39
zffr wrote: post #12

> And, not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can code Python but not Go (or another decent programming language), you probably have no business writing software for a living. I know it sounds harsh and I apologize for that, but writing software is a profession and hence you should have the knowledge, skill, and experience to use professional tools. Part of the profession of software engineering is maintaining…

Let me ask the obvious question. Why hasn’t the go community, of professional software engineers built an even richer ecosystem of libraries? Is it ennui, incompetence, or attitude? As Go came from Google, is that the attitude was, “I am a professional I’ll just write my own code to solve X”, rather than considering building a library that others can use? Are libraries harder to build in Go? Is adoption of libraries…

Compare the number of programmer-hours on Python to Go. Having a ~15 year head start helps a lot.

Plus, I've been programming in Go professionally for a while and it's been a while since I reached for a critical library and it was missing.

Go ends up needing fewer libraries anyhow; in Python you have the pure-Python version, no, wait, the Twisted version (which may not be current but are still all there, increasing the library count), no, wait, the async version, no, wait, the Python 2 version, no, wait, the one that binds to a C library.... and actually this isn't specific to Go, it's really more specific to Python. Library count gets bloated up over the decades by the fact that when, for example, Python went to async, all non-async libraries in which async was relevant suddenly needed a clone. Go has had effectively no language changes which create such parallel libraries (note changes, not additions; Go has had additions which create opportunities for more libraries but don't create lots of parallel libraries). I don't know that Python is uniquely changing, "best practices C++" is arguably up there, Javascript has had a lot of churn, but it's in the higher tier of such things. Languages that don't churn like that should be able to cover the same amount of "need" for libraries in fewer libraries by the numbers.

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#92

Post by calyth2018 »

It's the same old, tired rant about how Python's terrible.

The post is basically a surgeon complaining that a chef's knife is terrible for surgery; or how the F-16 can't loiter in the battlefield and deliver strafing fire; or how carbon fibre tubes don't handle compressive strength under water; or using C to do string manipulation and complex regex.

You're using the wrong tool for the job.

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#94

Post by fragmede »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #44
cjfd wrote: post #6

Yes, pretty much agree with this word for word. It is very, very difficult to refactor a python application in any sort of reliable way. The standard way of error handling in python appears to be to present the user with a stack trace. Very user friendly (not!). Now people will say that, for instance, mypy can help with this. That is true but since projects can be started without type checking chances are that your p…

I couldn’t (and still can’t) believe that non-exceptional situations are considered exceptional. Such as, there not being a way to parse a string into a number and return a value indicating if it was successful or not. With Python everything is an exception. Messy and inelegant. Of course this mess is called “pythonic” so everything is fine… https://blog.codinghorror.com/exception-driven-development/a... https://stac…

Whether or not you agree with it the argument for exception handling, rather than return values, is it lets the code more naturally flow for the successful case. The alternative is go's repetitive

    f, err := fn(...)
if err != nil { ... }

pattern. Which is better is really a matter of taste. To have error handling smattered all over the code seems more inelegant and messy to me.

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#95

Post by bPspGiJT8Y »

jrm4 wrote: post #26

Every single "This language is good" or "This language is bad" take really needs to always come with a "for what, exactly." "This wrench is really bad for hammering nails!"

The author of this article does highlight the cases where using Python didn't work out well for them, in fact multiple times.

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#96

Post by bb88 »

andjd wrote: post #72
IOT_Apprentice wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask the obvious question. Why hasn’t the go community, of professional software engineers built an even richer ecosystem of libraries? Is it ennui, incompetence, or attitude? As Go came from Google, is that the attitude was, “I am a professional I’ll just write my own code to solve X”, rather than considering building a library that others can use? Are libraries harder to build in Go? Is adoption of libraries…

Yes. Go has a culture that avoids using libraries (the axiom is "a little copying is better than a little dependency" (see, e.g. https://www.efekarakus.com/2021/09/23/a-little-copying-is-be... )

Having used go professionally, I would comment it's not just a little copying, but can be rather substantial.

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#97

Post by bb88 »

dafhagionio wrote: post #74
pkoird wrote: post #3

Terrible is using a dynamic programming language and expecting static features from it. Besides, linters and type hinting have come a long way.

>Besides, linters and type hinting have come a long way. You acknowledge that the kinds of static analysis that are feasible in Python are valuable, but it's "terrible" to want the kinds of static analysis that are infeasible. How interesting that the two boundaries line up exactly.

If you want static typing, typically you want to avoid python.

If you want the freedom to easily mangle json or other dynamic types, you'd enjoy python.

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#98

Post by tamimio »

Problem with python, it introduced a whole bunch of people into the programming world who have the minimum idea about programming or computer (mostly data scientists), just like how computer science introduced a whole bunch of people into “engineering” world even though they know little about computers at a low level, let alone at an OS level, that’s why several SaaS like heroku tried to close that gap because those “engineers” can’t into an OS!

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#99

Post by peteradio »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #90
PurpleRamen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The standard way of error handling in python appears to be to present the user with a stack trace. What do you expect it to do? Silently fail and move on?

No. How about something that is neither "silently fail" or "print a stack trace"? How about something that lets the programmer handle the error?

Yea python should introduce try except.

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#100

Post by _ea1k »

Interesting timing given the massive increase in Python for ML and data science applications lately.

Pytorch is a great library too. It is hard to imagine Python decreasing in usage any time soon.

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