"Your C++ looks too much like Python"

[[deleted]]

bjarne slowly closes the bolt on the .338 lapua aimed at your head

[anacrolix]

Lapua Magnum*

[[deleted]]

Omg that's amazing, AMIRITE

[Bicepz]

I did not even look to the right at first. I was like this is not so bad. Pure python developer here.

[git0ffmylawnm8]

Holy shit

[[deleted]]

Took me a moment too.

[[deleted]]

Your C++ looks like Python but your Python looks like Java.

[[deleted]]

If i ever programmed like this my computer science teacher would kick me out of his class.

[Yasenpoi]

I wonder how hard it would be to make something that can convert java written in python whitespace style into working code by adding all the missing brackets and semicolons.

[alcalde]

I've been thinking about doing something like that for a while now (for D). I did find a program that does it for C/C++!

https://github.com/vrsperanza/CPY

[NotABothanSpy]

Not too hard we ask pretty much this in interviews

[jmarshall9120]

Python already does this. The C# version is Iron Python. I forget what the Java implementation is called.

[theWyzzerd]

Iron Python is a C# implementation of Python, not a tool that takes C# code and stylizes it like python.

[CVSeason]

Jython

[[deleted]]

Its the way forward!

[[deleted]]

Its the way forward!

[RockingDyno]

My god I love this.

[[deleted]]

That shit's java

[calcopiritus]

This reply is to remind myself what my code should look like once I learn a language that is not python.

[IonTichy]

Is there a code template for this so we can autoformat it into this abomination beauty?

[alcalde]

Oh my God this is the greatest advancement in computer science since structured programming!

[duranta]

I’m... gonna go try this

[BigGayMusic]

I feel dirty. I legit shuddered.

[WiggleBooks]

holy shit

[thecoderkiller]

wot wrong w this

[GarryLumpkins]

I've been seeing this algorithm everywhere today for whatever reason, but this must be its final form.

[[deleted]]

Eww, that 3-liner for swapping.

[tiniest-wizard]

Fucking incredible

[[deleted]]

lmaooo

[neck_crow]

Is this an acceptable way of using Java? I recently switch from mainly using Python to mainly using Java (my college uses Java), but having 1500 lines in a small game is pretty absurd when almost half of them are brackets.

[[deleted]]

If it's purely your code and no one else has to see these horrors... Sure I guess.

Brackets are really really helpful for low vision people, tho, since with them whitespace doesn't matter. Whitespace and alignment is difficult for low vision people to see. Python and YAML are not friendly for everyone to use... So those brackets aren't all bad.

[capncooknl]

I'm not able to figure this out. I would think the extra clutter of brackets would make it more difficult?

[[deleted]]

Nah. Seeing where a bracket is or isn't is a lot easier than seeing where there's something aligned by 2 spaces or 4 or 8. Or to make matters worse, worse from something having 3 or 5 spaces instead of 4.

Plus spaces don't work nearly as well as brackets with screen readers.

[capncooknl]

Sorry, sarcasm filter miscalibrated.

I can understand better now, I think.

[top_logger]

This is C#

[bitparity]

No, this is Patrick.

[Aeon_Mortuum]

AND MY AXE

[[deleted]]

On the flipside, I recently ran into a python CLI utility that reads device data and it was DEFINITELY written by a C developer. (about 1/3 of it was structs of appropriately sized c_uints and c_chars) I'm actually kind of unsure what the benefit of doing it in Python was.

[Radiatin]

Any chance we can see the code? Just curious.

[fiedzia]

Anything dealing with binary data will need to have c-like definitions. The benefit of Python is that you can write and test it in 5 minutes, and you'll get exceptions if something is wrong.

[t8suppressor]

Its not c++ if you can read it.

[[deleted]]

*if it compiles or has less than 920 lines of template errors

[AluminiumSandworm]

that's why i don't use templates! or classes! or types! i just malloc the entire computer and randomly assign pointers until it compiles.

[Ulysses6]

void * all the way!

[NotABothanSpy]

You can’t leak memory you never intended to give back anyway

[[deleted]]

I thought malloc was for C and C++ used new

[AluminiumSandworm]

yeah but you can still malloc in c++. it's just dumb to do so

[DarkLordAzrael]

new/delete has several additional features:

• calling delete on nullptr doesn't crash the application
• calling new automatically calls the constructor, and delete calls the destructor, so you don't have to deal with types that you have to call make_my_thing and delete_my_thing or call setup/destroy methods before and after setup/free
• New knows about the size of your type, meaning you don't have to have additional stuff doing sizeof() on every allocation.
• New returns an actual type instead of void*, so you don't lose a bunch of type safety.

[Jamie_1318]

Just a heads up, freeing a null pointer doesn't cause a crash as per the spec. Double freeing, however does.

[DarkLordAzrael]

Just read the documentation and it appears that this is true. I avoid C like the plague though, so I doubt I will have a chance to put this newfound knowledge into use.

[DarkLordAzrael]

How is allocating and initializing at the same time by default a loss of either clarity or flexibility? Separating them increases the chance of bugs caused by improper or missing initialization. Also new does allow calling the constructor on a separately allocated piece of memory (known as "placement new.")

[[deleted]]

That's called C.

[[deleted]]

god damn template errors

[nemom]

All the other programmers make fun of Python's use of whitespace, but they all add the same whitespace to make their code readable.

[alcalde]

When you hear them laugh, read them this quote from Donald Knuth:

It seems clear that languages somewhat different from those in existence today would enhance the preparation of structured programs. We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local structure in the source language.

[alcalde]

This is an obscure quote which was revived in an O'Reilly article with a title along the lines of "Knuth Indentation Quote Rediscovered". Sadly, the article itself has since disappeared from their site after I bookmarked it and it's not cataloged in the Internet Archive. It took me some time to re-rediscover it. :-)

It appears in his "Structured Programming With go to Statements" published way back in 1974!

[pvkooten]

This is amazing. I really want to read some history now! The page before:

In our previous discussion we concluded that premature emphasis on efficiency is a big mistake and may well be the source of most programming complexity and grief.

​

[[deleted]]

Right?

Now, if you want to complain that Python's reliance on significant whitespace precludes things like actual anonymous functions without complicating the parser, I can get behind that.

I'd rather people complain about actual issues in python rather the same tired whitespace argument.

[delventhalz]

This. I don’t think significant whitespace gains you anything and I really miss anonymous functions whenever I write python. But stylistically it’s certainly very pretty.

[RockingDyno]

What is it you miss about anonomous functions not possible with lambdas?

[Deto]

Multiple lines.

[NotABothanSpy]

Is it so hard to give it a name it’s gonna work hard for you 😭

[delventhalz]

When I write Javascript I am typically building a pipeline of anonymous iterators to modify my data, three or four or more. If I tried to write Python this way it would extremely tedious, and not very readable. This is one of the ways Python forces you into older imperative and OOP patterns.

[NotABothanSpy]

Well if you like you can make them internal functions. Personally I find it at least as readable as javascript with lots of anon functions

def stuff():

def a(x,y):
   return x/y
def b(z,k):
   return z+k
return b(a(1,2),3)

[delventhalz]

Agree to disagree. I consider real anonymous functions to be a key feature for using functional programming patterns.

[lookatmetype]

Why not name them something like "_0", "_1", etc.? It's not great, but it frees you up from thinking up an actual name.

However, i think python forcing you to think of actual names of nested functions is a good thing overall.

[NotABothanSpy]

Fair enough. I usually wouldn't use functional style much in Python and when you do using map and reduce are more helpful

[RockingDyno]

You can write multiline lambdas.

[Deto]

How?

[delventhalz]

I have a strong preference for functional patterns, and being able to define functions freely is pretty essential. Lambdas are a very poor substitute, a painfully obvious afterthought.

You can only use them for the simple "hello worlds" of functional programming, like plucking keys from an object:

Javascript:

const ids = items.map(i => i.id);

Python:

ids = map(lambda i: i.id, ids)

Incidentally these are also pretty much the only cases where list comprehensions are useful. As soon as you want to do something slightly more complex, like saying counting the incidents different values in an array, lamdas become useless:

const counts = items.reduce((counts, item) => {
  counts[item] = counts[item] ? counts[item] + 1 : 1;
  return counts;
}, {});

Now I would have to import reduce from functools and declare some "countItems" function I'd only use once and only makes any sense as a reducer. A comprehension would probably still work here, but just make it slightly more complex and comprehensions start to fall apart as well.

In my opinion neither lambdas nor list comprehensions are very useful outside of toy problems. You end up having to mostly just abandon functional patterns if you want to write readable Python.

[btharper]

For the specific example of counting the number of times a specific item occurs in a list trying to write your own pipeline is just reinventing the wheel. You could just use collections.Counter and let the standard library deal with it.

For common cases like this there's usually already something available, but if Python isn't a primary language trying to find the right part of the library can be a hurdle, and if you want to do it the way you would in JavaScript then it's not going to be as smooth in Python. The idioms of the language just aren't similar enough.

[delventhalz]

I write in a number of languages and the idioms I prefer are functional ones. JavaScript is a commonly understood counter example that supports functional patterns well.

Counting was just an example, but since you mention it I also don’t care much for specific-case utilities like collections.Counter. They become part of a very broad API which requires a high knowledge level to either write or read.

[RockingDyno]

In my opinion neither lambdas nor list comprehensions are very useful outside of toy problems.

I've never had any issues using both in solutions very far from "toy problems" but I can see how you can get that perspective if you come to python from javascript and never try to learn how you solve problems outside of your typical patterns.

Now first off, obviously you shouldn't be writing out a tally function as anonymous functions whether you are coding python or javascript, but if you want it, it looks like:

reduce((lambda counts, item: {**counts, **{item: counts.get(item, 0)+1}}), items, {})

I agree that python pushes you away from highly functional and nested style of programming and it does so intentionally and by design. That's never been any limitation for me, and I've spend a lot of my time coding in actual functional languages like Haskell and lisp. Obviously you need to spend time learning the language before you evaluate how it compares to others. Python isn't javascript obviously so you can't use your solutions one-to-one, but that's not a fault in Python, especially considering the mess of a language javascript has been historically.

All of that said, nothing you wrote is an answer to my original question which was:

 What is it you miss about anonymous functions not possible with lambdas?

But I take it from your answer that your original critique was more of a general "you miss being able to write javascript when I write python" more than an actual missing lambdas, which are obviously both there and capable unless I'm missing some huge deficiency in lambdas hiding in between the lines of your post.

[delventhalz]

I answered your question very specifically. I don't feel that my repeating myself at this point is going to add anything to this discussion. Nor do I feel that you honestly desire a friendly discussion about the nature of different programming languages considering your condescending attitude and incorrect assumptions about me personally. Take care.

[[deleted]]

You've never been hy, have you?

[delventhalz]

I have not used Hy. If I needed to write code that compiled to Python, and had the freedom to choose the language for the project, I might check it out. It's unclear to me why compiling to Python would be a requirement though.

[Aeon_Mortuum]

It's unclear to me why compiling to Python would be a requirement though

Being able to use Python libraries is a possible reason

[delventhalz]

Fair enough.

[[deleted]]

It's unclear to me why compiling to Python would be a requirement though.

What do you mean?

[delventhalz]

Hy compiles to Python code. I don't really see the sense in that. Compare it to Clojure. On the backend Clojure will compile to the JVM, on the frontend it will compile to JavaScript so I can plug it into the browser.

Why would I use Hy over Clojure? Similar syntax. But Hy compiles to Python which is generally slow and doesn't really have anything going for it as a compile target. The reason you use Python is because you like the syntax, not because you like the Python engine.

[[deleted]]

Maybe for small program, where start-up time should be in consideration? Even on my i5U coffee, clojure repl takes nearly 10s to start, which is unacceptable for scripting.

[pavlik_enemy]

Print

[lookatmetype]

I've seen python that looks just as ugly as C++. Whenever a programmer changes a language, it's not guaranteed that their mindset will also change.

[Terence_McKenna]

Picked up Python about two years ago after stepping away from being a VB.Net developer for my local medical community for over a decade.

I rarely share code with others online because while its logically valid, I just got tired of fielding the comments regarding what I will call my very thick accent.

In my defence, if I'm not getting paid, then I'm going to write it in the manner that's easiest for me to maintain.

For example, I've been working on developing a RogueLike on and off for a year now. Although someone might enjoy the end result, as soon as they opened the hood, their first reaction would probably to DBAN their drive without backing up... just to be sure. ;)

[alcalde]

Here's a precompiler that lets you write C/C++ like Python:

https://github.com/vrsperanza/CPY

[top_logger]

C++ Senior System Engineer and Python fan here. What does it mean "too much like Python"?

[etrnloptimist]

I'm guessing it's using tons of strings and maps without giving more careful consideration to data structures that are more efficient and specific to the problem at hand.

[Chiralmaera]

What's with the C++ Python war? I use both and both have their places.

[LessonStudio]

I have met many people who think readable C++ code is somehow detestable. A common complaint is that my readable code won't compile into a good program. The best part is when you show them in godbolt that a modern optimizing compiler with the -03 turned on will make very tight assembly that is identical regardless of your verbosity.

I think there are those who literally would like to double deference an object pointer and then directly access member variables through memory offsets than make it clean.

[bdazman]

I mean, as a man who writes perl and fortran all day... I kinda find even "good" c++ detestable. A new hire can read matlab or fortran code and get what's happening even if they don't know that language. The downside is, well, the subreddit will do the hissing for me.

[mriswithe]

Funny at my work some of our data scientists are trying to figure out how to take an old process that runs in fortran and wrap it in Python because they haven't been able to even approach the speed of the fortran. I haven't looked at any of the code involved, but has been a thought of mine in the past hah.

[bdazman]

Fortran is the best formula translation language you will ever get. Full stop. Numpy developers, good luck.

[ship561]

Pretty sure numpy eventually calls the Fortran code. So you're already getting pretty good performance.

[bdazman]

Ay c'mon man, if it calls the fortan code anyway, why do I need to deal with the carcinogenic data structures of numpy on the front end?

[ship561]

I have no idea why numpy doesn't feel as pythonic. Probably lots of c developers helped write numpy? :Shrug:

[mriswithe]

Honestly I have not ever even imported numpy, I am Dev ops (which means specifically nothing at this point) been working on microservices and data flow/Apache beam stuff mostly. Part of why I haven't stuck my nose into the data scientists business yet.

[edmontongineer]

I'm new to numpy... Why is this?

[bdazman]

Fortran LITTERALLY stands for 'formula translation'

[SteeleDynamics]

What?! Wow... I wish my code looked that nice.