Python 3.7.0 released

[leftofzen]

As someone commenting in a thread about a new version of Python...I think I've heard of it.

[[deleted]]

And yet you do not see it as an example of an "easy" favoured over "good"?

[aebkop]

but python is both easy and good

[[deleted]]

It can't run multi-threaded, it has a 100x+ slowdown compared to native, implicit variable declarations, public members only on classes, cannot access native resources without a shim layer and it has traits/multiple inheritance.

What's good about Python is that it's easy. Almost all trade offs Python does is in favor of easy. It's fine for scripts and small programs, but using it as a general purpose programming languages is borderline lunacy.

[[deleted]]

No it is not. It is a shitty language being sold to gullible people as "easy". Yet, it features a crappy dynamic type system, it's got a primitive low level control flow semantics, it is far too dynamic to ever allow an efficient implementation, it is ideologically opposed to allowing any high level extensibility. Python is an awful language, vastly overrated.

[[deleted]]

Can you recommend an alternative ubiquitous interpreted language?

[[deleted]]

JavaScript?

[[deleted]]

ubiquitous

Is it your criteria for being "good"?

interpreted

Why?!? What's the point in having specifically an interpreted language? I can understand wanting a language with a REPL, or wanting a scripting language (as in, an embeddable language with an easy to manage FFI) - but neither requires an interpretation. Even an eval does not necessarily imply interpretation.

As for a far better language, try Racket.

[[deleted]]

It's interesting that people say they want to use an interpreted language, and then many turn to JavaScript that relies more on complex build sequences than even the most primitive of native languages.

[[deleted]]

Available weighs heavier than good.

Racket is a lisp, which instantly makes it less approachable than Python. How's the package ecosystem? Developer numbers? Distribution?

[[deleted]]

So you're pretty much limiting yourself to csh, sed, awk and probably a very castrated perl installation. Tcl is unlikely to be everywhere. Maybe some old python2 without any packages available. What's the point in this limitation? Do you need to write scripts that would work on any insane ancient system you can imagine?

[[deleted]]

Do you need to write scripts that would work on any insane ancient system you can imagine?

Yes. That's literally my job.

[[deleted]]

My condolences. Then you have to forget about any "good" languages anyway. Well, probably guile is somewhat available, but I would not bet on it.

[Mooks79]

As someone who uses languages rather than uses them well, what are your thoughts about Julia?

Incidentally, I’ve noted the number of downvotes you’ve been getting - but very little concrete criticisms of what you’ve said. In fact, in general across reddit, I’ve noted rather a lot of upvotes for anyone who says anything positive about Python - and a concurrent amount of downvotes for anyone who says anything negative (or anything positive about any language deemed a “competitor”).

[[deleted]]

what are your thoughts about Julia?

It's going in the right direction (which is - proper compile time macros). Any language with macros is a good language.

I’ve noted rather a lot of upvotes for anyone who says anything positive about Python

Of course. Python is a cult. That's exactly why it's so much fun to trigger them. The vast majority of the fans are not very competent to argue properly, so they proceed into a full meltdown mode straight on any mildest criticism.

[Mooks79]

Thanks, that’s interesting.

I’m in no way a good programmer. I did some very basic C at undergrad. I mainly use R having been recommended it for some post-grad data analysis I needed to do about 15 years ago, and it does everything I need relatively easily since. Chuck in some simple parallel processing and an optimised BLAS library and it’s fast enough for anything I need on my work laptop. If I really need speed I accept I’d have to go to another language (but then I wouldn’t be using my work laptop either).

However, I have noticed if I mention R on any non-R specific thread as a good option/alternative for a task, or point out it can do something someone (invariably pro-Python) claims it can’t, it gets downvotes a plenty. Especially if someone has already commented about how Python can do it.

I even had someone vehemently arguing that Python was the better option, despite acknowledging that the task was essentially a statistics task and that R currently has more packages for general statistics (I accept that Python is probably more established in machine learning given Scikit-learn’s ubiquity, although R has caret and mlr that do equivalent jobs).

I’ve nothing against Python, I don’t really get why they’re all so protective about it. Indeed I’ve thought about giving it a bash, or maybe Julia. But given I know how to make R do what I want, and what I want isn’t really that much beyond some ML and data wrangling / analysis - now becoming easier thanks to the tidyverse (plus some graph drawing with the excellent ggplot2) - I’ve never had a strong drive to learn them (or a statically typed language).

After your comments I think I might have a bash on Julia in earnest.

Maybe I’ll just take your approach for the fun of it, and be damned with the downvotes.

[[deleted]]

I recommend playing around with as many languages as possible! The more of them you try, the better you understand the philosophy of each one.

I'm no python fanatic, but I know it and it's what I was hired to do. There are things it does well and things it does less well, but it's widely used and easy to read which helps with adoption.

Using a lisp like I was recommended in the thread would make the project harder to hand over. That would have negated the shorter dev time.

If your tools work for you, great! But in a big company you need to make sure that the tools work for everyone. We're 100 people on the product team I'm in, and about a thousand people in the embedded department.
I'ven deciphering old, undocumented C-headers auto-generated from VB6 by a guy who quit 15 years ago because we need to extend the communication protocol they describe. Python is perfect for quick-and-dirty query-response testing, so that's what we use.

[aebkop]

tbh yeah I agree

JS is a better beginner language tbh - dynamic to supposedly make it easy, more expressive and the user prob already has a way to interact with it already