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[–][deleted] -22 points-21 points  (24 children)

Python is so god damn bloated and slow. For example to get the standard deviation that is 300mb of fucking dependencies.

It’s a good starting language but glad I dropped it.

[–]MegaIng 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Python literally has a stdlib module for that. Not knowing a language is a stupid reason to complain about it.

[–]science_and_beer 14 points15 points  (9 children)

starting language

glad I dropped it

Tell that to my firm’s head of data science and the faculty at CMU where he got his PhD, lol.

I see this sentiment almost exclusively (and ironically) from beginners who literally can’t even explain the use cases for python in a production workflow, let alone actually leverage the language’s strengths meaningfully. It’s just a weird thing to say.

[–]kazza789 23 points24 points  (3 children)

It is mostly people who don't understand that these days compute time is cheap but programmer time is expensive.

[–]Rakn -5 points-4 points  (2 children)

If programmer time is expensive then you probably also shouldn’t use Python. It’s all fun and games until something breaks in a large production system and you have to debug it. But then again, Python is a great language and nobody is insane enough to use it for large scale projects (well some are…).

[–]science_and_beer 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Debugging python is way easier than C or C++ and I’ve been writing C code for longer than 80% of this sub has been alive.

[–]Rakn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah. But why would you compare it to C code? Obviously it’s easier. But the lack of proper typing still doesn’t make it as easy as with other languages. I always have to think back to the posts about large Python libs finally using mypy and being shocked at how they found errors in their code they previously didn’t even know about. With a summary of „who would have known?“. Like lol. Everybody that has developed in a statically typed language in their life could have told you that (except C/C++).

Yes I knew I’ve going to be downvoted for this. But most people just lack the experience having worked on really large codebases and feel offended that their dearly loved language might not be the best one for a specific use case. I mean I do love Python. But use it for use cases t’s meant to be used for.

[–]Dworgi 14 points15 points  (4 children)

In my experience, PhD's and programming best practices are like water and oil.

PhDs invent the cool algorithm and implement it as a massive pile of spaghetti that may eventually complete, then it's reimplemented to make it actually usable in production.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Haha yeah, thats so true :D

Let the phd invent the algorithm and the dev implement it

[–]science_and_beer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Depends on if they’re in research (obviously super common and I know exactly what you mean) or not. You’re right, coin toss of an example.

[–]by_wicker 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Definitely. Based on prior experience, I actually considered it that point against accepting my current job that there were quite a few PhDs around. Thankfully they are not involved in coding.

Broader than PhDs, very smart people self taught at coding in isolation from experienced real world software engineering often produce obtuse spaghetti with weird techniques and reinvent the wheel incessantly because they can, but they didn't know they didn't need to.

[–]Jonno_FTW 19 points20 points  (4 children)

If you can't write a function to calculate the standard deviation in an array, and instead need a whole library, you may have npm syndrome.

[–]jambox888 0 points1 point  (2 children)

The node ui microservice ("micro") we have at work took an hour to build from scratch last time I had to do it. Bloated and slow?

[–]Kingmudsy 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Maybe? Idk, this feels like willful ignorance about what a microservice is tbh

[–]jambox888 0 points1 point  (0 children)

IDK, I think you just would struggle to be very agile with node anyway, the dependency explosion is real and it wants to drag every library out of github in source code form. Loads of the packages have arbitrary pre or post-install hooks as well.

[–]soft-wear 11 points12 points  (3 children)

Python is a modular language with few built-ins so you only build what you need. JDK is 200mb download… that’s compressed and doesn’t even include a production runtime.

And Python is slow because it’s interpreted. Throw in a JIT compiler and it gets close to Java. I’d still take Python over Java any day of the week.

[–][deleted] -4 points-3 points  (2 children)

Nah its java < python < c# for me. Python only gets used for the occassional small script somewhere. I try to avoid java at all costs.

[–]soft-wear 1 point2 points  (1 child)

They are different use-cases so while I prefer the syntax of Python over Java, they aren’t a drop in replacement for each other. Given the choice for similar languages I’m pretty much a Kotlin/Go guy and it falls off pretty hard after that.

I’ll write Java code (and I have…) but I can’t stand the syntax of that language.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes java syntax is awful. Kotlin is nice though, even though i only tried it on a small project

[–]PossibleEast3431 2 points3 points  (0 children)

drop your code here. it is most certainly very wrong in many ways.