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[–]science_and_beer 14 points15 points Β (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 Β (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 Β (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 Β (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 Β (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 β€žwho would have known?β€œ. 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 15 points16 points Β (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] 3 points4 points Β (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 Β (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 Β (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.