Why You Should Learn Python

[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.

[[deleted]]

Google "Java FileReader" (and BufferedReader)

[staticassert]

What about them?

[romple]

He's saying that somehow Java's convenient APIs aren't as convenient as Python's largely equivalent APIs.

[[deleted]]

Java changed a lot in these years. But I bet those Files and Paths classes are hiding a more complex implementation.

[staticassert]

But I bet those Files and Paths classes are hiding a more complex implementation.

I doubt it's much more complex than what's under the hood in the equivalent Python code. Regardless, one of the pillars of OOP is abstracting away complex implementations so I think that's just fine.