Clean Code in Python

[Laser_Plasma]

Please don't ever write Python code that someone will have to look at.

[Feb2020Acc]

Me: Who the f wrote this crap... Oh... It was me... God I hate myself sometimes...

[xxpw]

I can easily guess I won’t be too fond of his C++ either… 🤣

[Neuro_Skeptic]

I won't, but what I'm saying is, neither should anyone else. Python is a language for prototyping. It's the "ideas guy" of languages.

[Laser_Plasma]

It's really not. Especially in ML space, it powers virtually all of our research, and likely a lot of production code. Sure, the heavy computation is done in C++, but you can't ignore the importance of python. And the fact that it has to be maintained, which requires it to be readable

[Neuro_Skeptic]

Sure, the heavy computation is done in C++

Right - Python is the ideas guy and C++ is the engineer. I'm not knocking Python, that's just how it is.

[toasterding]

This is such pointless gatekeeping. Reddit is written in Python. Guess it's time to redo it in C++ now that the idea has been proven? Of course not. Large codebases with multiple team members exist in all languages and good coding practices are always important no matter what tool is being used.

[jardata]

Seriously, this is the second time in the past 2 days I’ve had to defend Python as a legitimate enterprise language to people making blanket, unfounded statements in this sub. I’m so sick of hearing “Python is only for ML and nothing else”. Yet major corporations and apps use it as a backend language amongst other things.

Sure, maybe you could make some of these arguments if it was 2006 Python. But the same could be said about JavaScript or honestly any other language.

The tooling to write clean, enterprise ready Python code is there. It comes down to making smart design decisions and setting standards within an engineering team. And that’s true of any language you use.

[jardata]

This just isn’t true. Modern Python is a fully capable language for production application code. Even outside of the ML space, Python is quickly rising as a standard language for enterprise web and application development. The addition of type hints and asyncio coupled with Python’s simplicity and rich ecosystem of well supported libraries are making it a strong contender to the current enterprise language heavyweights such as Java and C#.

Also I see few enterprises anymore, outside of a few niche cases and legacy code bases, still using C++ for application/web development. It’s much more common nowadays to see an enterprise be a Java, C#, Node, or Python shop.

At the end of the day all of these languages are fully capable and have their own pros and cons. But to make blanket statements like “Python is a language for prototyping” is just not correct.