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Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

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Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#91

Post by hackyhacky »

frollogaston wrote: post #77
Revanche1367 wrote: post #73

A lot of Python design decisions have felt weird and off to me but they’ve long justified it by saying that it’s those little ugly design choices that make the language so usable and effective in practice compared to more well-designed languages that hardly anybody uses. I’m not enough of an expert to clearly say if that’s really true, but imo, there’s a repeated pattern of slightly weirdly designed languages becomin…

JS is a lot less weird than Python. And Python is what I started with and continue to use half the time. The article missed the most common one, __name__ == "__main__" like wtf

> JS is a lot less weird than Python.

I challenge you to find Python behaviors as weird and off-putting as anything here: https://wtfjs.com/

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#92

Post by frollogaston »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #90
frollogaston wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python's strength is that it's easy to make C libs work in it. That's also why CPython is de facto the only Python implementation and stuff like PyPy never took off.

> Python's strength is that it's easy to make C libs work in it. SWIG[0] makes working with C libraries trivial for over a dozen programming languages; Perl, Python, and Ruby included. 0 - https://www.swig.org/

There are reasons all those Py libraries with C code didn't just do it in SWIG.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#93

Post by DarkUranium »

Animats wrote: post #32
neillyons wrote: post #19

I remember reading that in early versions of Python there was no built in True and False. Each user would implement this themselves as True = 1 False = 0 then later these got added to the language. In Python 2 you could still reassign and swap them so that 'if False' was actually true! True, False = False, True Python 3 you could no longer reassign them.

Misery is trying to retrofit "bool", True/False, and nil/null to a language. C had to do that. Python had to do that. Getting those wrong is one of the classic language design mistakes. It seems like treating "True" as a value that equates to 1 will work, but then the special cases get you. Like being able to perform arithmetic on True. Common language design boners: - Not building in strings. That's now in the past.…

Vectors & multidimesional arrays are something I'm 100% adding to my language's core.

It kind of started with vectors as the very first feature (I was sick & tired of libraries reinventing their own `Point`/`VectorN` in incompatible ways).

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#94

Post by frollogaston »

hackyhacky wrote: post #91
frollogaston wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS is a lot less weird than Python. And Python is what I started with and continue to use half the time. The article missed the most common one, __name__ == "__main__" like wtf

> JS is a lot less weird than Python. I challenge you to find Python behaviors as weird and off-putting as anything here: https://wtfjs.com/

A lot of those are stuff I'd never do like `Test.prototype = null;`. Some are legit footguns, but they rarely get in your way.

Python has weird file imports (no relative ones either), broken package management, historical differences between asyncio and blocking that still cause issues, threading/GIL caveats that trip up even experienced users, indentation for scope (esp weird given it was designed for REPL), weirdly no anonymous functions, 2 vs 3 (mostly gone by now), the __init__ and __init__.py stuff, namedtuple vs dict vs object, `global`, and a whole mess with type-linting if you're going there. You have to deal with all those things every time.

Here's one little Python footgun that everyone hits and is also annoying after:

  def func(array=[]):  # default value is empty array, right?
      array.append("asdf")
      print(array)

  >>> func()
  ['asdf']
  >>> func()
  ['asdf', 'asdf']

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#95

Post by Revanche1367 »

frollogaston wrote: post #86
Revanche1367 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a regular JS user and haven’t touched the language in a long time, but I remember a (popular?) website for teaching modern JavaScript mentioned that some aspect of the function/macro that returns the type of an object was just plain wrong in a specific and important case. This was years ago however, so maybe the problem isn’t there anymore. Anyhow, I added JS to the list mainly because it is known as a badly…

There are certainly weird things about it, but they're all things you can ignore especially in modern times, whereas in Python you're constantly dealing with it head-on.

Totally agreed there, Python is my main language nowadays because of work but the inconsistencies and lack of some very easy to add syntactic sugar to cover up some of the ugliness (like your example above) in a backward compatible way is constantly irksome and keeps me from really loving my most used tool.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#96

Post by AdamH12113 »

Animats wrote: post #32
neillyons wrote: post #19

I remember reading that in early versions of Python there was no built in True and False. Each user would implement this themselves as True = 1 False = 0 then later these got added to the language. In Python 2 you could still reassign and swap them so that 'if False' was actually true! True, False = False, True Python 3 you could no longer reassign them.

Misery is trying to retrofit "bool", True/False, and nil/null to a language. C had to do that. Python had to do that. Getting those wrong is one of the classic language design mistakes. It seems like treating "True" as a value that equates to 1 will work, but then the special cases get you. Like being able to perform arithmetic on True. Common language design boners: - Not building in strings. That's now in the past.…

Strings are a really weird data type. I'm not sure you can do much better than C strings without implicitly requiring dynamic memory allocation, which C deliberately does not do.

Definitely agree on multidimensional arrays. I feel like efficient arrays in general are underrated in high-level language design.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#97

Post by kccqzy »

frollogaston wrote: post #80
stouset wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll never not be bitter than Python “won” the scripting language war over Ruby, more or less just because someone did a bit of AI work in it first and it took over that space by default. Ruby has such a nice holistic consistency to it. With a few exceptions, it feels like it was conceived of by one person with a core idea in mind. Python feels like a mess.

Python's strength is that it's easy to make C libs work in it. That's also why CPython is de facto the only Python implementation and stuff like PyPy never took off.

Yeah and I would say that another important factor is Cython, which compiles Python with minimal modifications to C extensions that can in turn be imported in Python. It really makes it easy to get started in Python and worry about performance of the computation later. (Doesn’t help with concurrency I know but that’s a different story.)

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#98

Post by dismalaf »

frollogaston wrote: post #80
stouset wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll never not be bitter than Python “won” the scripting language war over Ruby, more or less just because someone did a bit of AI work in it first and it took over that space by default. Ruby has such a nice holistic consistency to it. With a few exceptions, it feels like it was conceived of by one person with a core idea in mind. Python feels like a mess.

Python's strength is that it's easy to make C libs work in it. That's also why CPython is de facto the only Python implementation and stuff like PyPy never took off.

Ruby can interface with C (or Odin, or anything that can export C style functions) just as easily.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#99

Post by jihadjihad »

hmokiguess wrote: post #34

Python is awful. There are so many one offs in libraries, none agree on a style, it’s slow, and it’s way too easy to do the wrong thing. I often work with data scientists and have to productionize their jupyter notebooks which is pure suboptimal hell. I guess it must be a good easy learning curve for research/scratchpad

> I often work with data scientists and have to productionize their jupyter notebooks

At least it’s Python/Jupyter and not R, SAS, or MATLAB.

Re: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird

#100

Post by stephenlf »

Revanche1367 wrote: post #73

A lot of Python design decisions have felt weird and off to me but they’ve long justified it by saying that it’s those little ugly design choices that make the language so usable and effective in practice compared to more well-designed languages that hardly anybody uses. I’m not enough of an expert to clearly say if that’s really true, but imo, there’s a repeated pattern of slightly weirdly designed languages becomin…

Yes. These are funny little quirks, but nobody will ever get tripped up by them.
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