Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Python Is Terrible

josvisser.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 125 posts

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#6

Post by cjfd »

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 project was started without type checking and that introducing mypy is somewhere on the backlog and when it comes off the backlog it will be enabled only partially because otherwise there will be too many errors and so on. It is such a garbage programming environment.

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#7

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

>forked worker processes to handle requests

File this one under "things that UNIX systems programmers think will work in principle but end up being massive black-holes of attempting to quiesce any non-trivial application in a way that results in a sensible post-fork state".

Re: Why Python Is Terrible

#9

Post by JohnFen »

Python is one of my least favorite languages and I avoid it wherever I can. I agree with several of the criticisms here, but I disagree with this part:

> The problem with Python is of course that it is an interpreted language with lazy evaluation

That isn't "the problem" with Python. There's nothing wrong with these sorts of languages. However, it does limit the sorts of problems the language is suited for, and I do see places where Python was used where another language would have produced far better results.

Perhaps using Python inappropriately leads to some thinking that the fault is with the language?

Post reply on HN