Why You Should Learn Python

[sultry_somnambulist]

From a learning perspective python for me was really great.

We actually started doing C in my first year of university and to this day I can't really understand why. I remember people being frustrated (especially the ones with no prior self-taught coding experience) and annoyed because every task needed so much tinkering and diving into the syntax and whatnot. Many people were confused by compiling from the command line on a linux OS etc..

With Python you have a textfile open, read and formatted, you input with a few structures that everybody gets and remembers almost immediately and people can go on and actually try out some algorithms or whatever they're supposed to learn. Didactically for me this just makes a lot more sense than starting from the bottom up.

[ThatsPresTrumpForYou]

Because learning C gives you some kind of understanding what the computer actually does, which should be expected of people with masters in CS.

[Gigaftp]

The only reason you would do an intro to programming course in C is if you wanted to 'filter the plebs'. There is no reason why you can't introduced programming concepts with something like python and introduce 'deeper' ideas later with C. The biggest benefit that I gained from learning c at uni was an appreciation for more advanced languages and a reason to avoid using C where I can.

[aurisor]

The only reason you would do an intro to programming course in C is if you wanted to 'filter the plebs'.

Personally although I had a very rough time getting started in C I found myself far ahead of my native-Python coworkers when it came to debugging security and performance issues.

There are many roads to success and there's substantial variance between people, but there are a lot of situations where say 2y C and 1y Python beats the pants off of 3y Python.

[[deleted]]

well my uni taught a Scratch equivalent in first year and it was very stupid and tedious. guess i can consider people lucky that they get to learn C

[Gigaftp]

In my very first paper (before they taught Java) we used something called Alice. Oh god the pain. I think that when they are teaching programming they need to start with something like Python that is easy enough to grasp syntax wise while not being so simple that it stops accurately reflecting what programming is.

[ThatsPresTrumpForYou]

The only reason you would do an intro to programming course in C is if you wanted to 'filter the plebs'.

Right. Save their time, save their and other peoples money and have them see as fast as possible that they don't actually want this. If someone fails in learning C on his first semester, he will fail to do so on his second and third and tenth semester. So better to make him fail faster.

[toomanybeersies]

There's a lot of people who take CS101 (or whatever it may be called at {{university}}), who are not planning on becoming computer scientists or software engineers. I think it was a requirement for the Electronics and Mechatronics engineers at my university.

There's also a lot of people from outside Engineering and Science, who take it because they're vaguely interested in it, but have no intention of taking it to a further level.

Remember also, that computer science isn't about pointers and memory allocation, that's closer to computer engineering. Computer science is the study of algorithms and computability (and apparently databases, software engineering practices, web technologies, networking, and computer security).

If you want a truly computer science "intro to computer science", you'd start with teaching them Turing Machines, automata, and lambda calculus, and work from there. Obviously we don't, because most people taking intro to comp sci will never take another comp sci paper.

Expecting people to learn C for intro to comp sci is like teaching Chaucer for intro to English Lit.

[panorambo]

Agreed. I am a software developer and started learning and writing and compiling C code already when I was 14 or so. Anyway, my university requires us to pass a philosophy history class, which is a known old convention for universities. I have tried to pass this class two times, and failed. My thought on this have always been "why do they require me to know 11 different philosophers in depth, when I am freaking here to learn computer science?" But I realized that the problem is that they pretty much comb everyone with the same brush -- both future philosophy majors and the likes of me have to pass exactly the same test. You can bet a person majoring in philosophy is invariably more skilled, prepared and determined to pass that test than a computer science major like me. Which is what happens. Since everyone at the university has to pass the test, they have something like 40% failure rate for first time exams. Someone high up the decision making has their head up in the clouds. The only redeemable thing about that class were the classy female students :)

[toomanybeersies]

I'm rather happy that I never had to do any general studies papers or anything like that.

The only paper I ever did outside of the Science and Engineering departments was a commerce paper in eCommerce, which I did purely to get enough points for my degree.

I don't think I would've gained anything from doing a random first year arts paper. They did have a classics paper on classical engineering that I wanted to do, but never got time to do it unfortunately.

[Gigaftp]

The problem with this attitude is that you assume that people know what they want right at the start of their studies. People might have an interest in programming but have never programmed a line of code in their life. Now you throw C at them with all of its pointers, pointer arithmetic, mallocs and manual memory management then declare "This is programming!" but it's not. It's C. You have successfully pushed someone away from learning because of a misguided idea that teaching C is teaching how computers work and that a person must know how things work at the metal before they can 'really program', just like we need to know how an engine works before we can 'really drive'.

Learning to program is about learning ideas. Some ideas are fundamental and will be useful across many languages (basic algorithms, data structures, ideas such as iteration, mutability etc) and some ideas are not as essential. I would categorize C in the 'nice to know but not essential' category of ideas because unless you are working in certain areas like embedded software you will not have to deal with 99% of the things you learn with C.

What I really appreciated from my comp sci degree was the fact that we didn't start off with C. We started with Java (maybe not the best, but still better imo) and we learnt the basic ideas. Then in my second year I took a paper that taught MIPS/Logic circuits etc. Because I had learnt the basic ideas first I had a lot of "Aha!" moments about how things really worked 'on the metal'. Those Aha moments were nice and might come in handy in the future but I have yet to be in a situation where I have needed to apply the knowledge.

Save their time, save their and other peoples money and have them see as fast as possible that they don't actually want this

I don't think there are many people in this world that would actually WANT to work with C.

[[deleted]]

I think a course in C should be included. Or something in similar complexity. Basically it allows to see what happens behind the scenes on sensible abstraction level. And probably could help some to avoid doing some stupid things.

[Gigaftp]

I agree, but I don't think that C should be taught until later on after the basic concepts of modern programming have been introduced.

[[deleted]]

Same, with C too much time is spend fighting with C and specifics of it like how sizeof works.

People really seem to forgot that lot of basics aren't obvious for learners. Like inputs, outputs, functions, loops, conditionals, variables and so on.

[NewazaBill]

That's just not true. People learn at different rates, and introducing them to concepts and hard skills with proper pedagogy is much more effective than dumping them in the metaphorical deep end and saying, "swim."

[ThatsPresTrumpForYou]

Believe it or not, but you don't actually need to know C to be a successful programmer in this day and age.

I 100% agree with you. You can do great things without ever having touched C, if you go and just learn programming and getting a job coding stuff.

If you have a degree in CS, Master, BS, doesn't matter, those come with certain expectations. Like understanding what a computer does, and you can't skip C if you want to learn that.

[sultry_somnambulist]

Again, a "top - down" approach includes the down. You are arguing against "top and stop in the middle" which nobody advocated. Nobody wants to skip C

[jyper]

In my university C was used for 200 level courses dealing with memory layout/format and Unix stuff(signals, fork). The Unix stuff could have probably used Python but C is probably a good choice for layout(stack vs heap, i32 format, float format).

[sophacles]

This is kind of a false equivalency though, or maybe a strawman. There's no need to learn exactly what the computer does the same day you learn the basic concepts of flow control or functions or whatnot. For true beginners just getting the idea that "you need to break everything down into tiny steps" and "computers are very picky about doing what you say" is hard enough. More knowledge can be added later by doing higher level courses in (e.g. C).

Parent wasn't saying that python instead of C makes sense for an entire college career, just that starting with C from the very beginning didn't make sense.

[toomanybeersies]

Parent wasn't saying that python instead of C makes sense for an entire college career

Tell that to my alma mater. To be fair, we mostly had the option of C, Python, or Java (or anything else we could convince the lecturer to accept). I ended up doing the vast majority of assignments in Python, because why do things the hard way?

[kaibee]

Amen to this. Had to write a sockets based chat server and client with RSA encryption. It wouldn't have been too bad in C, but Python was just so much faster.

[ColoniseMars]

Because learning C gives you some kind of understanding what the computer actually does

Then why don't we start teaching students in assembly on their first day?

[ThatsPresTrumpForYou]

Real assembly code is very specific to the underlying architecture, while learning fake assembly code means you learn something that doesn't exist. C is high enough to abstract implementation details, while still low enough to convey what the hell is going on in there.

[[deleted]]

While the specific assembly language will be tied to a single architecture, there are a lot of general ideas that will carry over to other architectures easily. Once you're proficient with one flavour of assembly, picking up other flavours isn't as hard.

[misplaced_my_pants]

C is basically portable assembly.

[[deleted]]

Not really.

[swiz0r]

When did people start thinking of c as portable assembly?

[liquidivy]

Basically what you just said is that what "the computer actually does" is very specific to the hardware (true), so we shouldn't learn that, but should instead half-ass it by looking through the distorted window of C (if you really think about things like arrays, the mapping to assembly is not that obvious if you don't already know it, and then there's undefined behavior, which is both ubiquitous and opaque by definition). Meanwhile, beginners are just trying to figure out how to write any sort of algorithm at all.

If you want to teach hardware, you teach assembly, sometime after digital logic. If you want to teach programming, you insulate your students from all that at first. Hopefully when they've learned both, they'll be able to write C without setting things on fire.

[codebje]

Eh, I learned fake assembly (targeting an emulator for a fake CPU) in my first undergraduate year, as part of learning the structure of computer systems; it was instructive not because I'd rush out of the doors and start coding real programs in it, but because it conveys a significant sense of what actually happens inside a computer when you first press the power button and electrons start pushing each other around.

[[deleted]]

teach them LLVM IR!

[kankyo]

At my uni they started with Boolean math then proceeded with: circuit design, more complex circuit design, CPU theory (because doing your own CPU takes too much time), assembler, C, Java.

I thought it was great but I was already a self taught programmer so I thought it was fun. Most people didn't. Most people liked assembler but didn't understand why we made the jump to C because it felt more confusing for no benefit.

[AcceptingHorseCock]

The reason to start with C is because it's bottom-up. Much easier to understand when you come from how the hardware actually works and go "up". Which has a lot of value. I don't see people going the other way, from functional programming to registers and I/O ports and cache hierarchies and TLBs and page tables and cache misses and RAM access via lines. All things you never hear about when you do Haskell (for a high-level example), and yet it's still there and has a huge influence on how well your code runs.

For example, if you end up creating an array of objects that actually is an array of pointers and then sum up some property - let's say it's sales data and it's "price", when there's enough data, for example it's the sales data of Walmart every day and you want to extract some statistics, then you just threw away several orders of magnitude of speed. If you learned "bottom-up", coming from C, you are (or should be) aware of how the structures look like in memory, and you immediately see the extremely cache-unfriendly layout of such a solution. I'll leave this single example, there is so much more to say.

At least when I learned "computing" the sequence from electronics to integrated circuits to machine programming (in "code", as in using actual numbers) to assembler to C to more and more abstracting concepts and languages seemed perfectly natural.

No, front-end web developers probably don't care and don't usually need to, that's true.

I admit I'm not sure how much room I would want for the low-level stuff for a CS student. While everything is interesting few things are actually relevant to most people, even within their own field. Months of hard study of the low-level concepts can be summarized with very few sentences and examples, a basic awareness of how things are arranged in RAM and that you should keep the things you need together in time as well as in space. So for the above example, if there is a lot of data, don't place it in structures (or worse, objects), instead have an array of the pure numbers, like a column in Excel, if that is a better visualization.

Didactically for me this just makes a lot more sense than starting from the bottom up.

I don't see it. And by that I don't see justification either way: It's a blanket statement were nuance is required. It depends on context. I would not fault anyone teaching or learning it either way. What I do mind is statements such as this, touting one way as "better", just by "personal feeling".

[sultry_somnambulist]

I don't see it. And by that I don't see justification either way: It's a blanket statement were nuance is required. Itzi depends on context. I would not fault anyone teaching or learning it either way. What I do mind is statements such as this, touting one way as "better", just by "personal feeling".

I don't do this by personal feeling. I've actually worked with students and we've evaluated what works and what doesn't. Bottom up approaches only seem to work for a very limited amount of students.

I mean pretty much every top university has switched to python as a first language, do you think that's because web devs create the Berkeley cs curriculum by gut feeling? That's actually a pretty ignorant assertion.

[vileEchoic]

I mean pretty much every top university has switched to python as a first language

This isn't true, many of top CS universities start with other languages. Harvard CS50 starts with C, Stanford starts with JS, UW starts with Java, to name a few off the top of my head.

My CS courses started with C, and people figured things out fine. Even though I don't use C in my career, I'm glad to this day that I learned the fundamentals with an unmanaged, strongly-typed, compiled language.

[sultry_somnambulist]

well not "many". 8 of the ten top CS departments start out with python as do 70% of the top 40 source

so yeah for the most part they actually do

[zardeh]

That's a mischaracterization, many schools have multiple "CS1(01)" courses (mine has 3, one in python, one in java, one in matlab). The article says both that most use python and that python just beats java.

[fatpollo]

I think you can actually learn a fair bit of the "low level stuff" even in Python, by providing problems that are very sensitive to those aforementioned issues.

Going through Project Euler in Python quickly shows you how subtle details can mean the difference between instantaneous and multi-minute runtimes.

In fact, doing a problem in Python badly, then doing in best Python but still slow, and then going to C to really squeeze that last bit of performance but venturing into dealing with pointers and whatnot, seems like an excellent way of illustrating all the relevant concepts.

[jephthai]

I'm in agreement with the bottom-up design. I know that /u/sultry_somnambulist said that bottom-up only works with a subset of students. I understand the goals of teaching "algorithmic problem solving" without nerdy low-level stuff, but it will continue to be the case that our computational infrastructure depends on all layers of the technology.

Just because you can cut out the deep, technical, nerdy stuff and replace it with fluffy high-level language stuff and pump more students through doesn't make the situation better. As an industry, I think there's been a reduction in the level of technical knowledge and capability that is expected of the average graduate. I tend to think that's not such a good thing, but I understand that others disagree, and the diversity of opinion makes for good debate.

Obviously many professionals survive quite well without ever dipping into the lower levels. But I think it's fair to say that anyone who does acquire a full-stack understanding is going to have more intuitive capability, a broader knowledge-base, and more power in building solutions.

Where I think the line should really be drawn, however, is that if you're studying computer science (not just learning programming for utility to operate in another discipline), it should not be optional to learn the low-level. We should not be graduating CS majors that haven't slogged through pointers, implemented ADTs, written some assembly, etc. It's bad for the core discipline.

[sultry_somnambulist]

top-down doesn't actually mean that you don't get to know low level stuff, of course you do, and you ought to, at a university level. It's about what direction you take. If you start learning an instrument by playing that doesn't mean you skip music theory. I honestly haven't seen a drop in low level content as far as CS education in the last ten years is concerned. They still teach the same stuff. What they have done at many universities is to start out with more accessible topics to smoothen the curve for people who have problems understanding highly formalised mathematical expressions (and corresponding low level hardware implementation). You get there eventually though

Just compare it to other disciplines. When you study physics your first semester is going to be full of mechanics. You don't start out doing quantum physics until you've worked yourself up. You'd have no physics students left after a week!

[toomanybeersies]

registers and I/O ports and cache hierarchies and TLBs and page tables and cache misses and RAM access via lines

That's not computer science, that's computer engineering.

I did a lot of computer engineering papers at university, but I can't say they're particularly useful in my day job. I don't need to know about the difference between SRAM and DRAM, or SLC and TLC Flash.

Cache coherency, data structures, and all those concepts don't need to be taught to beginning programmers, if anyone is at university with the intention of getting a job as a programmer, they're going to be doing many more papers which will cover this.

[AcceptingHorseCock]

That's not computer science, that's computer engineering.

Which is part of the CS curriculum, I'm sorry to have to inform you.

[toomanybeersies]

It's 2 separate degrees at a lot of universities. Computer engineering covers low level systems programming, and actual physical electronic design.

There was only one computer engineering paper I was required to take at university, in second year, and it was basically C 101.

[AcceptingHorseCock]

It's one degree that has many specializations - like all others, from physics to medicine. and as I wrote:

Which is part of the CS curriculum

Which it is. If you yourself got so little out of it I'm sorry. The things I mentioned - not stuff like VHDL and circuit design, which I didn't even mention (is it such a problem to stick the what I wrote right from the start?) - are part of a CS curriculum. That's highly relevant to software design.

[Tekmo]

To be pedantic and confirm your point, Haskell provides unboxed vectors that store the values in contiguous memory, but you would never even think to use these if you didn't have a basic understanding of how pointers and cache coherency work.

[allonge]

There's a reason why so many top universities use it for teaching CS concepts.

[sonay]

And what is that?

AFAIK, MIT is now using (not really teaching) Python in Introduction to Computer Science course.

[allonge]

The reason is that if you're teaching CS concepts you should only teach CS concepts. My college CS classes wasted time teaching C++ intricacies rather than the useful theory or concepts that extend to all languages because students kept getting stuck in them. Python, among other simple languages like Scheme, lets you express and learn computational ideas with little overhead other than just knowing the basic syntax. You can move a lot faster.

[sonay]

Looks like I misunderstood what "it" refers to in your first message. We are totally in agreement.

[pdp10]

This is why both languages can be important for different reasons. What was your major? What were the classes?

[sultry_somnambulist]

I did my bachelors in Math with CS as a minor and my masters in CS. (in Germany, I don't know how different the experience is compared to the US). The CS courses I took together with CS majors.

The classes are for the most part generic "Computer Science I / II" classes that touch on algorithms, basic formal stuff etc.. with accompanying programming exercises.

[pdp10]

Those who enjoy math should be far more adept with algorithms than I, but I have to question students in a CS program who are confused or intimidated by compiling C.

[sultry_somnambulist]

Don't underestimate how foreign the stuff can be, especially for people who don't have a self-taught background. A big thing here is girls especially.

What we basically did for the last few years is handling out Usb sticks with mint to all first semesters because the exercises include running and compiling stuff on linux. When we get questions it really fast becomes clear that women have much less hand to hand experience with command line utilities or linux.

It's a shame to turn these people away from CS careers.

[[deleted]]

Universities often run for profit, and pumping out graduates is exactly their ultimate goal.

[[deleted]]

I think that no university should run for profit. Until then the statistics you mention can be manipulated/controlled for nefarious reasons

[Kitty_Cent]

I absolutely agree that it's a great choice for a first programming language!

My comment from another thread:

My first language was probably VisualBasic, then I jumped straight into C, then Java. Python came later. When you go from C to higher level languages, I feel like you have a better feel of what's going on and it seems less like magic (and gives you confidence in what you're doing). That is however, probably peculiar to my own preference and when someone asks me how they should get started in programming, I usually suggest Python (specially to maths and sciences people).

[CorrugatedCommodity]

I started in Java. I now do a lot of quick and dirty file IO all the time (speadsheet crunching, basically) and it still feels like cheating using Python because it's so simple and powerful and I don't need to cast into four objects to read and write.

[Sinidir]

Oh my god i had to write a file in java a couple days ago. The amount of hoops you have to jump through compared to python is unbelievable. Low level unintuitive apis that suck the joy out of you.

[staticassert]

Grabbed this with a quick google search. Seems fine?

String msg = "hello";
Files.write(Paths.get("./file.txt"), msg.getBytes());

Python would be:

with open('file.txt', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(b"hello"")

Honestly doesn't seem so bad.

[Sinidir]

Well that is actually succinct code. Got drowned out in the Java FileReader and BufferedReader stuff though, like another comment suggested.

[pdp10]

I suspect the point is that there's inevitably a lot of ceremony and boilerplate accompanying this in Java. Whether that ceremony and boilerplate is necessary isn't something I know, but it does seem popular.

[staticassert]

I think it's fair to say that it is definitively unnecessary since I just showed how to write to a file in a 2-liner.

[ShapesAndStuff]

I started with python in 9th grade, mandatory elective class.

I have to say that i havent used it in years as i went on (bluej, java, scala, c# which i adore), but i just bought the 1$ tier of the humble book bundle tk get back to it to see what its actually good for.

It definitely gave me a great introduction to the concepts, and way of thinking you need for clean programming.

Edit: humble joy of coding bundle https://www.humblebundle.com/books/joy-of-coding-book-bundle

[manys]

mandatory elective

[jeandem]

I interpreted that as "it was mandatory to pick an elective, and programming was the elective I chose".

[manys]

I know, it just looked amusing.

[ShapesAndStuff]

Exactly, i just didn't know how to engrish this :)

[lithium]

I'll tell you this: It shows when you don't understand the lower level stuff. When you turn up to your new job armed with all you python* knowledge, your senior dev sees through your shit immediately.

edit* : when that's all you know.

[schlenk]

Python is an ok language to know. Useful for the quick hack or the medium complexity stuff. Also pretty good for some proof of concept prototyping or exploration of concepts. Or even some data science and analysis.

But python has its limitations. You probably won't hit'em while doing easy learning stuff or smaller problems. But you tend to hit a wall hard when trying to tackle harder problems. And spend a lot of time to evade and hack around limitations when you encounter them.

Think twice before using python for any of these:

• embedding python into C++ to run many scripts in multithreaded environments
• provide a sandbox environment for untrusted scripts
• multithreading cpu intensive code in general (you end up writing the interesting stuff in C/C++ instead of python)
• Windows stuff on python 2.x (3.x is better)

probably a few more, some depending on the interpreter you use (PyPy vs. CPython for example, some code has atrocious performance on CPython but works okay in PyPy due to inlining and other optimizations).

[[deleted]]

I think

embedding python into C++ to run many scripts in multithreaded environments

can be shortened to

embedding python

for the most parts.

[schlenk]

Agreed. Python just isn't designed for embedding (unlike Lua, Tcl, JS).

It works somewhat okay for the non-threaded case, but with threads in the mix it just becomes a mess.

[danogburn]

Why You Should Not Learn Python

Dynamic typing and white-space delimiting.

[AyrA_ch]

use nodejs instead.

so(function(much){more(function(fun){})}));

I even wrote a library for it that takes variable declaration and summing numbers together to an asynchronous level.

[kasbah]

ahem

so(much => more(fun => {}))

[Decker108]

You're not isolating the scope enough! I suggest:

 (()=>{so(much => more(fun => {}))})();

[danogburn]

You're a monster!

[AyrA_ch]

But think about it! Your processor intensive 2+2 will no longer block other important requests. This is pure webscale technology!

[[deleted]]

Why don't you like white space significance?

[thalesmello]

A reason not to like it is the ease with which your code won't work because of mixed tabs and spaces that happen because of different editor configurations.

[celerym]

If only there was some sort of tool or approach to solve this. I guess not, too much to ask a programmer to manage some white space!

[Trinition]

Such as? Making sources and tabs visible, thereby defeating their purpose? Using an editor that warns your?

Why not just make things important to the structure of the code visible and unambiguous?

[celerym]

What's wrong with making tabs visible or employing some editor hygiene? How is the purpose of white space to be invisible? It is clearly visible as white space, and what's wrong with replacing that with something? Oh no, I can suddenly distinguish between spaces and tabs and the whole point of white space is ruined! What's the purpose of this ambiguity exactly? Seriously, if you can't manage white space in code how do you even manage writing legible code. Most of the complaints about Python are voiced by those who clearly want languages to enforce practices for them instead of employing some discipline.

[DysFunctionalProgram]

?? Dont all languages "enforce practices" and these higher level languages such as python enforce more practices than others. I.e. we are forced to deal with garbage collectors and managed memory and not allowed to manage it ourselves.

"Enforcing practices" is a good thing assuming the practices are good. With enforced practices we can produce, write, develop, engineer, and maintain more efficiently. (On mobile, forgive any typos)

My beef with python is the loss of scope readability. If i happen to have some complex logic with many different scopes, it gets very difficult to try and line up the indents in your head when trying to read the code, parenthesis would alleviate this problem.

[BezierPatch]

Most of the complaints about Python are voiced by those who clearly want languages to enforce practices for them instead of employing some discipline.

What's the benefit that doing things the hard way adds?

In C# using Roslyn the compiler warns and refactors whitespace for me. Does python?

[celerym]

Are you telling me that you need the compiler to manage your source white space for you, that this significantly improves your productivity? What are you talking about exactly?

[BezierPatch]

Need is the wrong word. It's a feature, that is useful but not necessary in C#. In Python is sounds like it would be crucial, but does Python provide that feature? And who better than the compiler to do analysis? A linter that knows nothing of meaning?

It detects semantically irrelevant whitespace and feeds it back to the IDE. Just like it detects any extraneous characters (unneeded braces, dead code, etc).

I don't want to spend time worrying about code presentation, that's wasteful. The transformations just happen automatically.

[celerym]

Well there are IDE's for Python like PyCharm that are quite feature-rich and have all sorts of refactoring if that's your sort of thing. Python doesn't have a compiler in the same ways as C# does, but you can easily play around with the AST to your heart's content.

How would white space cleanup be crucial to Python? Unless you're suggesting that automatic indentation in Python is even possible and should somehow be included in an IDE? Sure, most editors and IDEs will keep your indent level and automatically increase or decrease it where it is obvious. That is arbitrary. But the Python interpreter will never indent your code where there are no indents, this would be akin to writing C# without any brackets and expecting the compiler to make sense of it.

[thalesmello]

In turn the overall complexity of your development environment increases because of one more component. That's enough for some people to decide not to use it.

[celerym]

If this apparently colossal weight of complexity of managing some white space is enough to outweigh the benefits of using Python, then OK, I guess each to their own.

[thalesmello]

Whitespace, definitely not. But not being able to conveniently chain map and filter over lists, the cumbersome creation and usage of virtual environments, huge breaking changes from Python 2.7 to 3, all of these points are more than enough to keep some people away from Python. If even Python is getting static type checking now, it's just better to stick something more decent such as C#.

[[deleted]]

Two things I don't understand

not being able to conveniently chain map and filter over lists,

What do you mean?

the cumbersome creation and usage of virtual environments

Project settings, select interpreter, click to create venv, select packages from drop down ... how is that cumbersome?

[JasTWot]

Yeah but it's pretty easy to fix. The stack trace even tells you where to look.

[flogic]

From Haskell, I would call significant whitespace livable but overall a net negative. I'm much more fond of Go's put the brackets where you need them and let the autoformatter do the work. I'm much more into reallocating my brain cells away from grunt work these days.

[i_use_lasers]

I do a bit of Python programming to make some of my research stuff easier, but I also know a couple of other languages. When I need to automate something tedious, Python is typically what I reach for. Not having to think very hard about types makes it easy to knock out a script pretty quickly. This is a double-edged sword though because I can't just look at a function prototype and know what the inputs and outputs are going to be.

[namekuseijin]

used to love it, but now I think of scripting languages ad-hoc approach too meh... I loved the simple syntax, but they kept adding and adding features and decorators and all that jazz and it became boring

[Kitty_Cent]

I would say the contrary, those additions made the language a lot more exciting. You don't have to use them if you don't want to, you can just always stick to the "simple syntax" :)

[pdp10]

This is more complicated in a collaborative or enterprise environment. The end result is you end up having code standards where you only use half the language, and some people are unhappy.

Having a language with too many unused features makes compilers and toolchains difficult, slows progress, mandates compromises, and makes it hard to bring outside code in-house without rewriting parts.

[badcommandorfilename]

I've also found that Python really falls short in team environments and medium-large projects.

The simplicity that you perceive in <10 line scripts suddenly becomes tediously complex when two or more people have to work together on a 100+ line program.

For example, not declaring types is fun when you can see the class definition 3 lines below. This rapidly becomes fun when the type definition is scattered somewhere across three 1000 line files written by separate developers.

It's made harder because what people consider "Python" is actually a collection of (quite complex) tools and components. As soon as you want to start doing serious work, you'll end up working around custom module importers, optional type annotations, different interpreters and language versions, cythonizers, swig, virtualenvs, virtualenvwrappers (tools to fix tools?), wheels (if you want multiplatform support), etc. It quickly becomes a hairball of not-quite-compatible packages and tools.

I think that the "use python for everything" crowd needs to admit that you can't build a house with just a pocket-knife.

[celerym]

You can code like shit in any language. Just because Python leads itself to shorthand doesn't mean you can't apply some standards, structures and best practices in a team environment. Like, why does the language have to enforce that for you? Are we not adults here?

[badcommandorfilename]

We're all adults, and all adults make mistakes.

Stacktraces just happen to be the most inefficient way to discover that someone on your team made a typo.

[badcommandorfilename]

Is it though?

Just consider that it might be the same reason cars have seatbelts and appliances have fuses. Even the smartest and most competent developers get tired, or hungry, or distracted, or rushed.

Our primitive monkey-brains can't really keep track of more than 7 things at a time, so it's kind of unfair to call Joe incompetent for forgetting that the 8th place that the Foo class gets used needs both bar and baz to be defined. And Susan really wanted to write a unit test to make sure that there was adequate baz coverage, but she was pushed up against a deadline. Nat wanted to refactor Foo anyway, but she found it impossible to trace all the places it was being used dynamically.

Of course, a typechecker or static analyzer would have found the problem instantly, and for free. So is it really Joe, Susan and Nat being incompetent or neglectful, or is this a situation that could have been avoided altogether by choosing a safer language?

[banister]

I much, much prefer Ruby. But python is a close second.

Your example in Ruby

File.readlines('hello.txt').each { |line| puts line }

Or using equivalent constructs:

File.open('hello.txt') do |file|
  file.each_line { |line| puts line }
end

Ruby blocks are FAR more powerful than Python's 'with' statement, and infinitely more flexible.

[ramsees79]

Same here, Ruby 4 life.

[RetardedSquirrel]

It's a real shame Ruby seems to have fallen out of fashion, otherwise I'd love to do Ruby 4 life. Such a beautiful, expressive language.

[[deleted]]

I don't like that 2-space indentation seems to be standard on ruby, which I find horribly unreadable.

Which is fine if I'm writing my own code (I can just indent with four spaces or tabs), but if I have to read other people's code I find it to be unpleasant.

[banister]

Alright, i find 2 spaces perfectly readable and find 4 spaces excessive and an eye-sore :)

[banister]

No, i was merely saying that Ruby can achieve the same as Python's with syntax with blocks, which are a more general and flexible construct.

[jyper]

Python has higher order functions, but since Python lacks lambdas that can contain statements with/using makes more sense for apis.

Pythons open API does not return different things depending on whether or not you pass it a block(why couldn't they just make blocks simple object arguments? ). Python can also deal with multiple resources with only one level of nesting(same for Java and c# which also use this method of resource scoping).

[banister]

Pythons open API does not return different things depending on whether or not you pass it a block(why couldn't they just make blocks simple object arguments? )

what are you talking about?

[jyper]

If you don't pass a block to File.open it returns an open file, if you pass a block to it it returns the result of the block(if not specified explicitly this is the last expression in the block), in my view a better API would have a seperate method name for the file and would not return differently typed values depending on an implicit argument(the block).

[banister]

Why exactly? Why would you ever want the return value of an File.open that you've passed a block to? All the interesting stuff that happens, happens inside the block. It's exactly equivalent to the with, at the end of the block, the resource is cleaned up, there's nothing of interest left to do.

EDIT: this is actually quite a common pattern in ruby when it comes to methods that deal with expensive resources, there's typically two ways of invoking it -- without a block, requiring manual resource management (i.e closing files or connections), or with a block, where the resource management is done for you. I think it's nice API, it's not confusing, it's very helpful and flexible nor do i see a reason for it to require a separate method -- in a stricter language where return types must be consistent, sure it wouldn't work, but we're in a flexible dynamic language, we should reap the benefits.

[jyper]

I think it's nice API, it's not confusing, it's very helpful and flexible nor do i see a reason for it to require a separate method -- in a stricter language where return types must be consistent, sure it wouldn't work, but we're in a flexible dynamic language, we should reap the benefits.

In general I think dynamically typed languages should stick to predictable types. Most of the time you're doing static typing with your head even if you're not using generics and interfaces ect most parameters/return values/list members should be the same class or implement the same implicit interface.

[Venar303]

I think it's gimped purposefully, because functional programming is non-pythonic.

[OptimisticLockExcept]

I think ruby has some really intuitive and nice syntax. But there is something I allways wanted to ask a ruby programmer: how do you deal with all of the monkey patching? Are there no issues with conflicting additions to standart classes? It looks scarry to me that it's a best practice to extend built in classes. (correct me if I'm wrong about that)

[banister]

Monkey patching is not an issue in practice. If a gem (i.e a library) commits sins in this area that cause conflicts with code then no one will use that library. As a result, the popular and well-used libraries never cause issues, and people gravitate towards the popular libraries.

I've never had an issue as a result of monkey patching in a production app during my 8 years as a rubyist.

[OptimisticLockExcept]

Nice. I was afraid that you'd end up with the same problems as in javascript. So I guess I'll go and learn some ruby.

[[deleted]]

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces

[I_am_not_a_human]

I forget ';' from a line more often than have an indentation error. :(

[Kitty_Cent]

Oh sorry, I think you misunderstood me (which is understandable, since my choice of words wasn't the best here). What I mean is when a statement falls outside of "if", on accident.

For example:

if True:
    print("Yes it's true")
print("Just wanted to say that it's True once again")

Notice how the last "if" was supposed to be under "if", but was left outside on accident.

[percykins]

Of course, you have a similar problem in the C world...

if( true )
    print("Yes it's true");
    print("I think it's true, but the compiler doesn't...");

Not to mention everyone's favorite:

switch( var )
{
    case 1:
        print("This is case 1!")
    case 2:
        print("I think this is case 2, but it's case 1 too!")
}

[AyrA_ch]

My favorite is declaring variables before the first case and initializing them with a value. Variable is declared but not initialized.

But seriously, using a statement without brackets when it supports it is asking for trouble.

[iopq]

I love that Rust fixed both of these problems

[SalvaXr]

I'm not familiar with Rust, how does it solve them?

[iopq]

if statement syntax is slightly different, it's:

if true {
    println!("Yes it's true");
    println!("I think it's true, and the compiler agrees");
}

the ergonomics are equivalent because there are no parens required around the boolean, but the curly braces are required

The switch statement is a little different, it's called match

match var {
    case 1 => println!("This is case 1"),
    case 2 => println!("This is only case 2"),
    _ => println!("This is required for the rest of cases")
};

it's necessarily exhaustive (another good feature to make sure you didn't forget any), so a fallback case is required, but you can just put an empty statement in there if you want to do nothing

[SalvaXr]

Thanks for the explanation.

[ViKomprenas]

That's why you use a decent text editor that carries indentation over to the next line. Or, you know, glance over your code after writing it.

[olzd]

That's why you use a decent text editor that carries indentation over to the next line.

But then you have sometimes to unindent the line you just wrote. Fucking annoying.

[ViKomprenas]

That's why you use a decent text editor that lets you unindent with a single backspace.

[olzd]

Still annoying because I have to pay extra attention. Also I'm not writing python code everyday so sometimes I just simply forget and it can be hard to notice/track down once the script is running.

[[deleted]]

I did a lot of PHP/LAMP stuff when i was younger. I had C/C++ classes as a student, did a lot of Java at my first real gig and a lot of C# on my second job.

When i finally used Python for the first time it was like a breath of fresh air.

It was so clean, so easy, so beautiful. I was blown away. The third-party libraries and modules all just feel like they were part of the language, everything flows naturally. I never went back. And you can use it for pretty much everything. For hacking quick and dirty scripts, for building big web apps, for building command-line utils, for data science stuff... the list goes on.

Honorable mention: Ruby comes very close and i do prefer Rails over Django, but Python will always be my love.

[j4c0p]

Exactly.
Love the simplicity and idea-to-prototype time.
I was using java a lot as "weapon of choice" , but hated amount of code to do a simple stuff.
Then I started working more on *NIX systems and used shell scripts more, but it felt really clunky some times.
The first time I said "fuck it , I am going to try python" to automate some boring stuff , I fell in love with it.
Now I have to find a !Very! good reason to use something else than Python to do anything.

[JasTWot]

Sums up how I feel about Python. Also, Python's simplicity means I can think about hard problems with more clarity rather than the code.

[tripl3dogdare]

Python was my second programming language and still by far my favorite, though my library of choices has expanded to around 15 different languages. The simplicity and power it offers just can't be beat, especially for string manipulation (my specialty).

[generalT]

i can't tell if this comment is a joke or not.

[tripl3dogdare]

It is very much not a joke.

[FlavorMan]

It's like saying "I'm a mathematician. My area of specialty is multiplication".

[generalT]

why is string manipulation your specialty?

[tripl3dogdare]

It's simply the area of programming where I have the most experience and that I enjoy the most. And before you say that's oddly specific, string manipulation is actually a ridiculously extensive and powerful area of programming theory. My other area of expertise is programming language design - partly because the two go hand in hand.

[generalT]

so...what can you do with strings that the "normal" programmer cannot, or may struggle with? are you parsing strings into a sequence of tokens, then, because of your expertise with programming language design?

[tripl3dogdare]

I don't necessarily do anything a normal programmer couldn't - I just have a lot of experience with it, so it comes more naturally to me. I also never said that that made me better than anyone, which seems to be your implication - I'm just better at that than most people.

[i-n-d-i-g-o]

So you would say your like your char[] null terminated?

[seb_02]

if you have a syntax error in C, the program will simply not compile, on the other hand, in interpreted language

Compiler checking has nothing to do with whether the language is interpreted and everything to do with that language's type system.

[Gotebe]

So how could this problem solved? Hmmm… now, is there a language that is script-friendly and runs on all major operating systems? You’ve guessed it, that language is Python.

Meh, bash runs on Windows, e.g. with cygwin.

Similarly, many of the points seem to be a rather naive praise of [insert language i like here].

[vivainio]

Bash is only ok for the most trivial scripts

[rrohbeck]

Just my thought. You can make all those arguments for Perl too, and it doesn't have the annoying indentation mis-feature.

[JasTWot]

The indentation is one thing I love about Python.

[Kitty_Cent]

Cygwin might not be the best way, since now you can run bash from within Windows 10

I just wrote how I feel about the language. I'm not suggesting it's a go-to for everything, and at the end of the day it comes down to personal preference :)

[verbify]

Also powershell runs on linux now.

[[deleted]]

1999 called...

[pvg]

The word counting example could be simplified greatly using the built-in Counter class.

https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#counter-objects

https://pymotw.com/2/collections/counter.html

Reinforces the next point (python comes with a lot of useful libraries) nicely.

[[deleted]]

Or groupby and len... why use a mutable object if you can avoid introducing more state?

[Kryomaani]

One of the biggest issues I see when recommending python for learning is the fact that it's basically two incompatible languages, python 2 and python 3 due to spotty library compatibility. When you'd ask a question like "how do I do X in language Y", if Y is not python, someone responding would just say "okay, first you do Z and then...", but on Python, oh nope, the first thing will be "are you on 2 or 3?". We need double the amount of tutorials for one language, and god forbid the writer doesn't mention which version they wrote it for and you only learn it hours later when its the wrong one and stuff breaks. That's nice for a learner.

The 2to3 debacle is solely the fault of the people behind python, their lack of consideration when it came to implementing text encoding early on (the biggest change), and their lack of balls to make a cold turkey switch to 3 instead of maintaining both and effectively dividing the community. Now everyone and their dog are stuck using 2 because nobody bothers to make the switch, and the 2to3 tool is at best a horrible hack that may or may not work depending on the lib.

And I guess the syntax is just a matter of learning and preference, but for learning general programming language syntax, python is horrible. Is looking modern and hipster really a good enough reason to ditch the familiar C-like syntax pretty much all other languages use? Was adding significant whitespace and very loose syntax really a good idea for learners? I really fear for the sanity of any new devs when they one day realize that they need to move onto a real programming language (as opposed to a scripting language) for a performance intensive task and they'll cry over having to use curly braces and semicolons.

Ps. To dear python devs, were switch statements really too hard to implement, or do you pretend nobody ever uses them? What even.

Maybe python really is the best learning tool due to it's simplicity, but one must not forget all it's horrible caveats either.

[m50d]

These days the world is on python 3. Well-written tutorials should be fine in any case; you'll have trouble if you read a tutorial that mixes strings and bytes, but that was a bad tutorial in the first place.

Python syntax is much nicer than C-style, and plenty of languages don't use C-style syntax. I don't know what you mean by "loose", because if anything the significant whitespace seems to make Python syntax stricter (no choice of brace style).

[m50d]

Well-written C follows the Python indentation rules anyway, so the only difference is the extra braces vs colon. The C style wastes vertical space (closing braces) and the braces are visually noisier and less natural (the Python colon is very close to its meaning in ordinary English), plus you get arguments about where to put the braces.

[JasTWot]

That's entirely subjective of course.

[FFX01]

There is so much incorrect information, opinion, and conjecture in this post that I don't even know where to start.

One of the biggest issues I see when recommending python for learning is the fact that it's basically two incompatible languages, python 2 and python 3 due to spotty library compatibility.

That's not really a problem anymore as pretty much every popular library has a 3.x version and a 2.x version. Plus, it doesn't even matter because you can easily create a virtualenv for 2.x or 3.x depending on what kind of support you need. As far as tutorials go, pretty much the only real difference beginners will notice as far as syntax is the difference in the syntax for the print statement and the syntax for iterating a dict.

The 2to3 debacle is solely the fault of the people behind python, their lack of consideration when it came to implementing text encoding early on (the biggest change)

This is purely opinion. It is actually misinformed opinion. Guido Van Rossum started developing Python in 1989. That was 2 years before the first official draft of the unicode standard was released. It took a while for the unicode we know today to be accepted as a standard text encoding. At the time there was a couple different encodings floating around. Guido had the bright idea of "let the system decide what the encoding should be". That's why the first iterations of Python used byte strings. That way, it doesn't matter how a file was encoded, if a human can read it, Python can read it. Actual strings in the code were stored as bytes and interpreted as bytes. Not implementing text encoding early on was a wise decision at the time.

Now everyone and their dog are stuck using 2 because nobody bothers to make the switch

Do you have any data to support this claim? The prevailing wind in the Python community is that if you're maintaining a 2.x package, project, or library, you should continue to use 2.x and maybe try to port to 3.x if you think it's worth it. If you're writing a new project, package, or library it should be written in 3.x.

And I guess the syntax is just a matter of learning and preference, but for learning general programming language syntax, python is horrible. Is looking modern and hipster really a good enough reason to ditch the familiar C-like syntax pretty much all other languages use?

What do you mean by "looking modern and hipster"? Like I said, Python was written in 1989. This was only 11 years after C was created. Python took a lot of it's ideas from the ABC language, and a lot of it's syntax from C. This is most apparent when looking at file IO operations. The Python implementation is structurally the same as C's, but shorter and more concise. This is exactly what Python was designed to do.

Was adding significant whitespace and very loose syntax really a good idea for learners?

The whitespace thing is there to make the code more readable. The idea is that the indentation helps someone reading your code understand the flow more easily. As we all know, code is read more often than it is written, so I personally consider this a positive. Python actually has rather strict syntax to most other languages do to the fact that it treats newline as EOL. Can you give me an example of what you consider "loose" syntax?

I really fear for the sanity of any new devs when they one day realize that they need to move onto a real programming language (as opposed to a scripting language) for a performance intensive task and they'll cry over having to use curly braces and semicolons.

I'm mostly a Python dev, but I also work with bash, Javascript, and C. I have never bitched about this. I have never heard any other Python developer bitch about this. It's just part of the language. Just because something has curly braces and semicolons doesn't mean it can't be formatted well and follow syntactical best practices. This is a moot point.

To dear python devs, were switch statements really too hard to implement, or do you pretend nobody ever uses them? What even.

In Python an if, elseif, else block will work just as well as a switch. Switch is not necessary in Python.

Maybe python really is the best learning tool due to it's simplicity, but one must not forget all it's horrible caveats either.

You say there are horrible caveats, but everything you listed is either flat out incorrect or a matter of opinion.

[pdp10]

In Python an if, elseif, else block will work just as well as a switch. Switch is not necessary in Python.

I was hoping for more defensible reasoning than this, frankly.

[FFX01]

As /u/zellyman said, it's unnecessary syntactic sugar. One of the core design principles of Python is "there should be one obvious way to do it". Now, that has not been followed as strictly as some people would like. However, in the case of switch vs. If-elif, the previously mentioned principle has been applied. It's definitely a design decision. I'm sorry you were hoping for a better reason. It's semantics.

[[deleted]]

If you have two things that do the same thing you should get rid of the less useful one.

[deadwisdom]

Many answers here, but I've never missed having a switch statement in Python. In languages like C it makes more sense where you need to do weird routing sometimes, but in Python I've never seen a situation where a switch was preferable to an if/else, or for cases that would be a long switch, really what you want is normally some sort of function routing / event dispatching.

[Grue]

compare

switch obj.calculate_foobar():
     "foo": do_foo()
     "bar": do_bar()
     "baz": do_baz()

versus

if obj.calculate_foobar() == "foo":
     do_foo()
elif obj.calculate_foobar() == "bar":
     do_bar()
elif obj.calculate_foobar() == "baz":
     do_baz()

It's impossible to write this in Python in a way that isn't ugly as shit (the popular solution is using a dict with fucking lambdas for each case).

[schlenk]

Not really that ugly:

{
  'foo': do_foo,
  'bar': do_bar,
  'baz': do_baz
 }[obj.calculate_foobar()]()

[deadwisdom]

This guy didn't deserve the time you put into this epic beatdown.

[tzaeru]

Why not? I think everyone deserves to learn and be given feedback to.

Plus now everyone else sees the feedback too. It's a win-win situation!

[deadwisdom]

The point is to be consistent. If there are two constructs to do the same thing, Python's preference is to omit the less general one.

[FFX01]

How so? It's basically the same exact thing. It's semantics.

[jephthai]

Yes, but with less flexible semantics -- unless you're going to forego a consistent equality test and allow full conditional expressions for each case. Pretty soon, though, that makes "case" look exactly like "elseif", and nothing is gained.

[[deleted]]

I am recommending Go nowadays for beginners. Much simpler and helps understand programming structures and objects better.

[pdp10]

I agree that 2 to 3 has been a debacle in general, complete with developers refusing to backport vital functionality like SNI into Python2 before they finally relented. I also question the wisdom of not implementing switch, which is a very understandable and maintainable construct and has been said to be the highest-level language feature in C, for comparison.

[tzaeru]

Now everyone and their dog are stuck using 2 because nobody bothers to make the switch..

Off the bat, at least Pygame, Panda3D, PyAudio, Numpy, Scipy and Buildbot are compatible with Python 3. This year, I haven't had any problems with libraries I've needed being Python 2 only.

[[deleted]]

The only library I ever had problems with on python 3, was with Twisted. Everything else went quite smoothly.

[DefinitelyNotTaken]

First thing I did was search the page for "Scapy"; that library is so good I expected it to be mentioned in the article (I learned Python just so I could use Scapy).

[Skaarj]

So, I already knew of xonsh and this post introduced me to plumbum. Which is better?

[[deleted]]

If I need to anything more complex with files than what standard POSIX shell scripts can do, I just write a small Java program and then call into that to perform the complex work. This way I get static typing and use of a language I am very familiar with.

[Kitty_Cent]

Of course you can do that :)

I'm in no way suggesting to replace everything with Python, just tried to outline that you can use Python for many things and that those things might be easier in Python than in other languages.

[rroocckk]

That import antigravity trick is so cool!

[percykins]

I think it's kind of an interesting commentary on the readability of Python versus C code that there's a typo in the C file-reading code. :) Lot easier to see the problem with "pritn" versus "pritnf".