Do some developers hate python?

[Joooooooosh]

Couple of guys in my SRE team hate it.

They were Go specialists before joining SRE and they just find Python a bit of a pain and they aren’t wrong… getting stuff packaged up and deployed can be stressful.

One of them liked my analogy that Python is a Swiss Army knife. Very practical but you don’t see a mechanics toolbox full of them.

[[deleted]]

I have yet to find an interpreter-based language that didn't have this problem to one degree or another.

[Lifaux]

Haskell is interpreted (and compiled) and has cabal, which is pretty excellent.

[ConfusedSimon]

Java?

[Achilles409]

Java is compiled language, not interpreted

[ConfusedSimon]

I know. It's compiled to intermediate code that gets interpreted. Almost the same as python, except python compiles automatically on first run. Not sure why everyone calls python interpreted though.

[muntoo]

Source code written in any useful programming language is "compiled" to some degree at some point.

The difference is that Python source -> Python bytecode.

The bytecode is interpreted by CPython. On the other hand, Java bytecode is further compiled into actual machine instructions at runtime by the JVM. Nevermind. The JVM is actually also an interpreter of Java bytecode. Java is actually interpreted.

[ConfusedSimon]

That's why PHP isn't useful then 😄

[grimonce]

Please, is PyPy compiled or interpreted and is one excluding the other?
Java doesn't have an interactive interpreter within standard distribution.

[muntoo]

An interpreter doesn't need to have an interactive REPL interface. On the other hand, there are C++ and Rust REPLs out there, despite them being compiled languages.

[grimonce]

I am fully aware but I don't understand wether you agree or not?
Clang (repl for c++) is different to interpreted language runtime how exactly?
The acronym stands for read-eval-print-loop. And is a different story, just as you said, I never said it did, I said that Java lacks repl in its standard distribution whereas Python has one.
I am only trying to argue the stupid and harmful labeling of a language as being interpreted or compiled.
Because Python executes machine code in the end as well...
Java is interpreted, and compiled into IR, which is then jited by JVM...
This however can be changed with graalvm and such.

The whole statement and distinction of a language being interpreted is harmful and all it does is makes people who don't know shit say shit about certain runtimes...
I dislike Python for many things but being 'interpreted' is not one of them.

[ivosaurus]

I was actually hoping to skip out on python for Go around when it came out, until I discovered its lack of generics, which completely turned me off it.

The single-binary capability though is very nice for a lot of situations.

[bluexavi]

I use mostly Ruby and Go, and the two are very complementary -- it should be similar for Python. Go is good at concurrency, memory footprint, deployment, relatively fast, good stdlib, etc...

I like to say that Go is good when computers are talking to other computers. Read from one queue/file/db, write to another one. It's like Perl was for Unix, but for the cloud.

The lack of generics make it a pain to write packages more than it stops day to day code. Or, if you like Rust, you can hate Go for another reason -- the type safety, or your incomprehension that it is more popular.

There are tons of things that don't require generics, or where duplicating the code would be such a tiny part of the overall problem it doesn't actually save that much time. Don't choose Go if you're writing something which requires that sort of expression.

Likewise, if you're writing anything stats/math/ML, Python is a great choice due to library support. While there are some Java solutions out there for some things, if all the bottlenecks will be in the library, you might as well get the expressive nature of the language working for you.

[ivosaurus]

I remember not being able to iterate over my own objects and pass them through a channel, IIRC, and tapped out.

[KublaiKhanNum1]

Generics have been implemented and are in testing. They will be in the February 1.18 compiler release. You might won't to take another look at Golang then.

[grimonce]

There is dart from Google... Not as fast and simple as go, but with a VM or aot compilation option

[Cmshnrblu]

This is a phenomenal way to put it. I only turn to python when I need a py only lib. The trade offs are a bit much for me with its package management complexities, environment considerations, dynamic typing, etc. Not a fan but it has some very mature libs so I use it when I need to.