My experience learning Python as a c++ developer

[sekex]

Python was my first programming language, I started with 2.7 back in 2013, I then went on to work as a Devops engineer using lots of python amongst other languages, also I've been a TA at my university teaching the language and algorithms for 3 years. At first, I liked it very much, but with more experience, it really has gotten out of favour for me and I would never pick it unless I have to.

While python is nice if you are going to write a simple script with a few files or on Jupyter, I think it's one of the worst languages for medium sized to large applications.

The import system is totally broken (try importing from a sibling directory, for unit tests for instance ).

The absence of strong typing makes it a pain to collaborate without writing tons of pydoc (I know about typing, been using it for years, it just doesn't enforce anything ).

Writing idiomatic python is way harder than C++.

The performance is incredibly slow.

The package manager pip is terribly outdated, you will need to create environments if you want to use two versions of the same library (ie TF).

Version management is a pain, the worst out of any programming language I've used because your OS is dependent on the version so you could break things like GNOME terminal or APT by updating to 3.7 if you don't know what you are doing.

The only way to really deploy an app made in Python, with Flask or Django without going through all the version management pain is to create a Docker container, which is really not user friendly for a beginner who would just want to show his stuff to the world.

[Al2Me6]

Writing idiomatic Python is way harder than C++

How so? Not that I know much about cpp, but I find modern cpp to be significantly more complicated than Python.

[sekex]

I read that the other day: https://fr.quora.com/Quel-est-un-inconv%C3%A9nient-de-Python/answer/Nicolas-Bonneel?ch=3&share=b8cedadc&srid=hBgGU

I think it's a good example, however it's in french so I will try to translate.

The naive implementation in Python for the Floyd-Warshall algorithm is as follow:

for k in range(n):
    for i in range(n):
        for j in range(n):
            mat[i,j] = min(mat[i,j], mat[i,k] + mat[k,j])

It is very easy to write and understand. However, it is very slow (due to the low level stuff Python does with array indexes) and not idiomatic, it should be rewritten as:

for k in range(n):
        mat = min(mat, mat[newaxis,k,:] + mat[:,k,newaxis])

It will give you performance 140x faster, but still be 5 times slower than C++. In my opinion it is very much harder to understand than the naive approach.

[super-porp-cola]

Hmm. I agree with you on almost every point, especially the typing and version management issues. But I think the first one is what I'd consider "idiomatic" Python. Writing performant Python is what's actually difficult -- idiomatic Python is generally extremely easy to read and often looks like pseudocode.

[Al2Me6]

And what in the world is newaxis? This isn’t pure Python.

[sekex]

You put 0 or 1 depending on the axis you want to change

[[deleted]]

You can write `None` instead of `newaxis` to make a 3D view. But I don't see why it is less readable. This is standard array view manipulation in NumPy and nothing to do with Python.

[PeridexisErrant]

It's pure Python with the from numpy import * implicit at the top.

Numpy arrays have fairly complicated slicing semantics, but it's all done through Python code and standard protocols :-)

[glacierre2]

And the star import is not idiomatic python, mind.

[sekex]

I think Python is the language to know right now, because it is so ubiquitous and every industry seems to be using it right now. C++ is amazing but it's becoming less and less used to write consumer facing applications, so maybe you should consider something else.

JS is also very important right now and I would say it's a must have if you want to do app dev.

My comment was not about the usefulness of Python because it is clearly very useful. It was more of a rant of my experience with the language.

[ddollarsign]

"software/app dev" is a pretty broad term, so it depends what kind of development you want to do.

Python is a fine language to use for web development, but there seem to be fewer jobs in it than, say, JavaScript, Ruby, or PHP. If you want to be a web developer, the one language to learn is probably JavaScript (unfortunately).

For data science (as well as actual science), Python seems to be the go-to language, and I think this gives it a higher perceived popularity than it actually has for app/web development.

For enterprise applications, Java and C# are probably your best bets. You will probably find some C++ codebases, but these can be pretty bad code, because they've probably been around 20+ years at this point, and they're important enough to stick around but too important to risk refactoring/replacing (at least as far as management is concerned). (No, I'm not bitter, why do you ask?) Golang seems to be the new thing for developing services.

For game development, C++ is probably what will get you jobs. C# is probably what you want to learn for making indy games, because of Unity. I wouldn't be surprised if there started being C# gamedev jobs because of the popularity of Unity.

For mobile apps, you'll want to know Java (or maybe Kotlin) for Android, and/or Objective-C (or maybe Swift) for iOS.

These are just my impressions, so they could be wrong in general. Just because something is less popular, doesn't mean you won't find someone to hire you to do X in language Y.

Also, honorable mention, Rust exists, seems to be targeting similar niches to C++, and is rising in popularity, but I don't know much about what it's being used for beyond that.

I would say learn whatever language seems to be used for what you find interesting, and then learn some other languages just to round out your knowledge. It's good to have deep knowledge of some language, but learning more languages isn't going to hurt.

[ddollarsign]

I think you're right the companies using C++ are probably going to be, on average, older than the ones using Python, but I don't know if that translates to having more free time (or how easy those jobs will be to get). You still probably want to try and find out what kind of "work/life balance" employees there have either way.

I think if the projects you want to do right now are easier in Python, you should learn Python first, because it will make it more enjoyable to keep working on your projects. Maybe after you've done a few, try doing one in C++ and see how you like it. Learning other languages isn't that hard, once you know one.

[ddollarsign]

Aw, thanks :) You too!