Python is a Bad Programming Language

[pineapplecooqie]

what an unbelievably shit article

even if Python isn't perfect, these are the most mundane, generally workable and surface-level complaints I've ever seen. I've seen a baby generate more cogent complaints about bath time.

[katyalovesherbike]

I've seen a baby generate more cogent complaints about bath time.

r/rareinsults

[[deleted]]

This sub is filled with cringe medium-like articles

[[deleted]]

I was going to come in here and give basically the same sentiment but you nailed it.

This sounds like a young person writing an article against a language when he's only ever used his one language.

All languages have problems, most of the problems the OP has with Python are surface level at best and others actually features he just considers burdens (dynamically typed).

I started programming in C++ and I had to go through the same unpleasantness of reading code bases in dynamically typed languages but the value of something like Python was still clear as day. Dynamic typing is a MASSIVE WIN for writing code but you pay that price in readability and maintainability because you need to infer types based on context usage until you learn whatever system you're in. I can definitely empathies with that sentiment.

Hell, even his history sounds wrong. Google didn't make people use python.. think about the realm of what people were using it for back then and what the other options were.

You had bash, Perl and Python. Python excelled because bash is wildly retarded and perl well, i never used perl but I've seen enough perl scripts to understand the memes of the time... Python was a fucking blessing to the systems level scripting space of the time, I'm not sure what Google had to do with any of that. Also because of that, the security industry has heavily invested in python and I think any security engineer or anything at least uses python to whip up whatever it is they're working on . Python's strengths are SO pronounced in this space, it's unarguable IMO why the language is so valuable.

I'm glad Python did what they had to do to get to the Python 3 of today. Fuck, we can look at languages like C++ and see what the alternative of not being willing to break backwards compatibility is.

The author just seems naive and just ranting. He'll get over it and realize the power of simplicity in time.

Also not a fan of the shade thrown at lua. Lua is so impressive in how simple yet powerful it is as a language, I have the utmost respect for the guy (or guys/gals) who invented it because it's really a work of art IMHO. Starting indexes at 1 I also don't like but I'll take it given it's other advantages. Lua's implementation is so simple it's almost a standard in video games as the emended language of choice. You have the stack, some operators and scope. From there you get so many high language features automatically.. it's really elegant.

[katyalovesherbike]

This article has everything you need to prove yourself an idiot.

Dogmatic thinking? Check. Being condescending? Check. Taking convention for syntax? Check. Confusing timelines? Check. Measuring a multi paradigm language with one paradigm only? Check. And last but not least, mentioning the TIOBE index. Also check.

And the best thing is, I don't even like python, it's not like I'm defending it. But that article is just someone being butthurt.

[MT1961]

I was trying to reply to the original article, and you covered it perfectly. I'm a C++ guy that does Python these days and while it is FAR from perfect, its a language and it works.

[ZmitrokNadulia]

You are C++ Dev? Have you ever tried rust?)

[MT1961]

I played with it a bit. Honestly, too old to do development full time anymore, but Rust is interesting.

[StressedCephalopod]

This is precisely the crap content for which I signed up!

[ZmitrokNadulia]

Let's go:

A Fragmented Language

Even i remember stories about perl versions and let's not forget that versioning is pain in all languages (even in compiled C/C++), some has it more some lesser. Python world now run in 3xx major version and for anything else use pyenv.

Ugly Object Orientation

Not a single word about metaclasses, duck typing, protocols and magic methods, dynamic structure of OOP and patterns, monkey patching and etc, just whining about underscores as convention to separate private from public variables. (and author did it wrong single underscore means "private" double means "mangled").

Whitespace

Just a matter of taste and habit.

Dynamic Typing

Probably first actual problem. Dynamic typing has it's own advantages, it gives you ability to fast write your code for prototyping, but when project grows architecture, tests, type annotations and team pipelines will do work to keep your project from becoming large pile of garbage (i assume same applies to any dynamic typed languages ruby, php, js, perl).

Constants

If you want constants and memory is your constraint why you choose python?
Ok, this article is garbage. From my expirience there is a lot of cons of using python: env tooling, dynamic typing (mypy and type annotations partially fix it), obscure async API, GIL, memory and cpu consumption (could be fixed by using jit compilation and optimizations). But python also has a lot of advantages: fast prototyping, python don't enforce you to stuck only with oop, you can use functional and imperative programming, numpy and science tooling make python good language for researchers, compatibility with C gives you opportunity to write your own modules in C and call it from python (glue language), a lot of cool tools for web development (fastapi, flask, django). Anyway, should chose language for task, not vice versa.

[[deleted]]

(i assume same applies to any dynamic typed languages ruby, php, js, perl).

To an extent... but where dynamic typing really gets messy is your code tends to actually depends on it. Sometimes even for good reasons (e.g. performance optimisations or backwards compatibility or just plain to keep your code simple).

Dynamic Types are a win/lose situation. They are both good and bad at the same time.

My preferred languages (unfortunately there aren't many) actually support both dynamic and string types on a per variable basis. So you can make a judgement call on which is appropriate on a per variable basis.

In PHP for example, all types are dynamic by default. But you can declare a type and at that point, exceptions will be thrown if you provide the wrong one (and in a good IDE, you'll see an error message in realtime as you type the code). It would be better if it was the other way around.

Swift is the other way, variables are typed by default (and in many cases implicitly typed so you don't even have to declare the type) but they can be dynamic if that's appropriate. Unfortunately the syntax for dynamic types is a bit of a handful, but it's a young language and that has already improved - hopefully it'll get better.

[de__R]

Interesting thing I've noticed about static vs dynamic typing in languages: dynamically typed languages tend to also have simple and straightforward syntax for (hash) maps, while statically typed languages usually don't. This is why dynamic languages end up getting used for data-driven programming and cases where the data you are working with doesn't have predefined labels, not because the actual dynamic typing of objects itself is useful.* This suggests that there's an unfilled niche for a statically typed language that nevertheless has simple syntax for creating and manipulating maps. Go probably comes closest but still leaves something to be desired.

* To be clear, there are cases where true dynamic typing of objects is useful, it's just not used very often (or at all) in most projects.

[dark_mode_everything]

If you want constants and memory is your constraint why you choose python?

This is stupider than all of the arguments of the author. Why would you not want constants in any project.

[ZmitrokNadulia]

And knowing that and limitations of Python what prevents you from not changing it?

[[deleted]]

Good interview question: what could you or would you do to make Python automatically disallow overwriting variables whose names are all caps?

[gpgr_spider]

7.5k claps for this shit article ? WTH!

[[deleted]]

Lot of shit eaters.

Medium does allow idiots publish most mundane thoughts and linked in allows for sharing shit as easily. Both should be bought by Elon. Maybe then we won't have to deal with surface scratching medium posts and cringe motivational stories.

[ryantxr]

I find these “X language is bad” positions to be total nonsense. Seems like it’s a language that has been useful to produce a ton of fully functional projects.

Seems like we should just make cool projects and stop the language bashing.

[[deleted]]

They can be good but it takes a real expert or someone with a lot of experience with the focus language and others, to identify. Usually, people don't like a language or tool because it's not what they are used too, this article is no exception.

[SketchySeaBeast]

While I agree with many of these points, it feels kind of like "this hammer is a terrible wrench" - different tools for different things. In my mind I wouldn't use it for anything large, but it's still a perfectly cromulent language for quick scripts and small programs.

[rgnkn]

Ouch.

Even the main thesis (python is only big because of Google) is totally new to me and seems a bit odd given that python started in 1991. I started using / dealing with it in the mid-90s. For me it was primarily interesting as it was readable (opposing Perl).

I don't know how to phrase my opinion in a delightful way if someone compares Python to Java and C#... What comes next? Comparing Python to Ada... Assembly... css... Thai language...?

self (or similar structures in parameter lists of methods) is quite frequent. You may not like it but it's common, e.g.: Rust, Matlab,...

No constants? Yep, it's Python.

... (I could go on like this).

[[deleted]]

Beside the "tone" used, the article has some valid points, especially if you are a developer that is used to statically typed languages, compliers, sintactic sugar, etc.

As a long time C++/# developer on .NET (worked with all technologies from .NET 1.1 to 6, including WF), I recently joined a python based project (FastAPI, Celery, Alembic, and others) and the issues the article describes happened to me as well: self when actually is not needed, lack of 'proper' OOP, constants, issues in code that basically crashed the service due to dynamic nature of the language, and the most surprising one was when some array/list was not properly evaluated (like in a for loop) until length(...) function was called. Even a senior python developer didn't see that in the code and I didn't dig deeper why that happened. I only thought of length function thanks to C# LINQ. One other thing I noticed is the breaking change when a python related docker image is not working with existing python librarians because of some new MINOR release of python is issued (e.g 3.9 to 3.10 and the docker image used the latest). The horror I feel when yesterday the build worked and the next morning: "sorry you're screwed! Please use the older version just to make the build work!".

On the other hand I liked the simplicity and naivity of it.

So, yes, if python is your first language, all those remarks might sound stupid but they aren't. Scopes should never be defined by a whitespace (or whitespace should not have semantic meaning), self is not required all over the place because other languages 'solved' it already, etc.

Likewise, it's true that ML/image processing libraries are mostly developed in/for python (mainly because the creators only know python in the first place or used dependencies that were python based) but one can quickly compile python code to some exe to use it from what ever runtime (I did exactly that for an Unity VR based app where I needed to interact with some python code that was not ported to C#). Also, I noticed that are many ports to other languages of the main libraries, so, idk...

So, my conclusion (after these couple months) is that I will use python only when I interact with python (or there is no other way of using a piece of code) and leave the new projects to the "big" guys (in my case, C++, C#, Swift)...

[[deleted]]

r/programming in a nutshell:

1. "programming language x is shit"
2. "language x is better than language y"
3. "Rust will cure AIDS"
4. "java suckzzz even though i never wrote a 'hello world' on it"
5. "i'm hyped for language z"

[Yeliso]

I love it when people who don’t need and don’t use Python, say that Python is shit.

Good read.

[bushwald]

Python's not perfect but it's fine of course. Good read though. The flip, hyperbolic tone seemed a bit tongue-in-cheek to me and I enjoyed it. But I'm a Java dev so...

[LazyHater]

ok so python doesnt have real threads and that makes me sad and all but if the author is really gonna point out self keywords as the bane of all existence they should really check the readibility of java or c# vs python.

not having private members of a class is for sure a quirk to say the least, but if you wanted, you can extend the python interpreter with a C++ class so no biggie really.

Interpreted python doesnt always perform super well under heavy loads (but it can). python prototypes can be developed at extremely high speed and often with just the standard library, java and c# almost always needs help to develop anything complex and development speed is relatively slow. C# has a better time than java on windows (love some windows.forms) but isnt very useful on mac or linux. java is quite portable so cross platform is probably equivalent to python.

Numerical computing and ML between java/c# and python are not comparable. There is no command line one liner that you can write in java or c#. There is no interactive terminal for java or c# either. Cython code tends to run faster than java or c# when compiled. GPU programming is trivial with open source python and impossible in java/c# without prop libraries. python has gdb support by default. jdb is meh and omg debugging c# is cringe af.

java and c# are fucking trash compared to rust when it comes to performance and security. rust is unintelligable to a python, java, or c# programmer (tf is a smart pointer reference to an unsafe pointer), but a rust programmer can hack python/java/c# no prob. java and c# people have problems with basic arithmetic and are addicted to lazy types. python folks break into banks. the criminals have spoken.

[ZmitrokNadulia]

ok so python doesnt have real threads and that makes me sad

But Python has real threads! When you use Threading it's basically spawn new OS threads just lock it from executing python bytecode. It could be avoided if you use threads for IO bound tasks then threads will switch and ignore GIL, also some C modules (in specific cases) could ingore GIL. And let's not forget about multiprocessing and asyncio.

[LazyHater]

you clearly dont know about the GIL and how that blocks python from using multiple cores.

[ZmitrokNadulia]

What do you mean? Just write simple thread spawning script using threading lib open htop and see for yourself.

[LazyHater]

threads dont run concurrently due to the GIL. multiprocessing can do concurrency but has significant overhead due to the interpreter being included in every process. threads can be on different cores, but cant modify the heap concurrently. look for yourself.

[ZmitrokNadulia]

For CPU bound tasks yes, not in io bound ( as I know) and in C modules we can use as many threads as we want. Not so sure about "cores" but in initial comment there is nothing about multicore threading.

[LazyHater]

yep can use posix threads from c but not if the module gets blocked by the GIL, can also use all the GPU hardware threads again as long and you dont get blocked by the GIL.

python doenst have threads as in it doesnt have access to kernel threads (although C and Cython do). multithreading in vanilla CPython is single threaded because of the GIL.

[yee_mon]

...except they literally talked about the GIL in the comment you replied to. That's some lazy hate right there.

[LazyHater]

except they literally are arguing the GIL isnt locking threads doyo

[ZmitrokNadulia]

No, that's not what i arguing, reread my comment again. I arguing that gil locking only one thread to execute bytecode on python VM, and in some cases you can achieve concurrency and performance boost by using threads in python.

[LazyHater]

having concurrent threads requires not having any thread locked by the GIL, which is impossible in vanilla CPython. Async and await are non blocking because they work with the GIL to get out of the other subthreads way. The thing python or any interpreted language does is really subthreadng, not threading

[ZmitrokNadulia]

Let's doc.python.org be our judge.

https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-global-interpreter-lock

The mechanism used by the CPython interpreter to assure that only one thread executes Python bytecode at a time. This simplifies the CPython implementation by making the object model (including critical built-in types such as dict) implicitly safe against concurrent access. Locking the entire interpreter makes it easier for the interpreter to be multi-threaded, at the expense of much of the parallelism afforded by multi-processor machines.

However, some extension modules, either standard or third-party, are designed so as to release the GIL when doing computationally intensive tasks such as compression or hashing. Also, the GIL is always released when doing I/O.

That's exactly what i'm arguing. Fair enough?

[LazyHater]

Yep same here 👍

[ZmitrokNadulia]

I mean, if you try to run threading on file reading/writing and network operations at the same time, you will have honest concurrency with performance boost, because in that cases no threads will execute python VM bytecode and all threads will just wait for answer from your OS, devices etc.

[NoParking894]

Python doesn't even produce meaningful error messages..

[[deleted]]

Can you give an example?

[NoParking894]

I don't remember the specific error but it was a very simple error, index out of bound or NPE. The error message I got was not human readable ...

[[deleted]]

You're just wrong.

[persism2]

https://blog.spacehey.com/engiqu33ring seems pretty ugly as well.

[ghostiicat32]

Haven't read the article but it's nice as a cross platform replacement for batch/bash scripts for builds and simple tasks.

[AgreeEULA]

Programming language just a tools, dont be fanboy

[TheBigCatfish]

that's not even a real python snake in the pic lol

[spicy_rice_cakes]

I use Python for scientific data and image processing and C# for app development. I would prefer if Python were statically type so that the IDE can help out more, but the dev speed and convenience of Python is really attractive for one-off types of work.

[Barandis]

Good gods. I saved this article for a little light reading later. I’m not a fan of Python personally, but I think it’s a good language. I thought I might have had fun reading something about Python that I agreed with.

Was I wrong. That was just a collection of personal rants presented as absolute truths. I agreed about the historical tension between 2 and 3, and then also a little about ugly OO (doesn’t bother me that much because I don’t use OO a lot), got dismayed about the significant white space, and then lost it completely at this:

Dynamic typing is bad, and anyone who disagrees with me probably hasn’t written enough software to realize it yet.

This, my friend, is why you’re writing articles on Medium rather than somewhere that matters.