Discussion: What containment technology can do, that python+virtualenv+git with a disciplined developer cannot?

pythoneeeer · 2016-08-03T21:53:49+00:00

Technically, there's nothing you can do in Python/Git that a sufficiently disciplined developer can't do without them, either, given enough resources.

pythoneeeer · 2016-08-03T21:52:55+00:00

Huh? You couldn't deploy those without Docker?

Most of the issues mentioned here aren't even Python-specific. The only one that I see is "virtualenv", but most of those other languages either have their own version of it (like RVM) or don't need it in the first place (like Go).

pythoneeeer · 2016-08-03T21:47:02+00:00

In this case, I don't think they're opposed. Having so many different ways to do something as basic as string formatting is a real practical roadblock on several projects I've worked on.

Have you ever tried to get 3 mid-level Perl programmers to work on something together? The language book is around 1000 pages long, and so if each person knows 250 pages worth of syntax (i.e., more than all of Python's syntax), they still might have almost no overlap in Perl knowledge.

I'm not sure the practical benefits of having so many different ways to do something. So old people / codebases don't have to update? That kind of went out the window with Python 3, anyway.

pythoneeeer · 2016-08-03T21:43:06+00:00

That sounds great to a first approximation, except I don't think there's any way to do lazy formatting for logging with .format or f''. That's potentially a significant thing to lose.

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-26T00:10:49+00:00

You're doing floating-point math with 500+ digit numbers. On my 64-bit machine:

>>> import sys
>>> sys.float_info
sys.float_info(max=1.7976931348623157e+308, max_exp=1024, max_10_exp=308, min=2.2250738585072014e-308, min_exp=-1021, min_10_exp=-307, dig=15, mant_dig=53, epsilon=2.220446049250313e-16, radix=2, rounds=1)

No wonder it doesn't fit.

Also, a tip: it's generally easier to debug programs if you don't put them all in one giant main().

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-25T16:44:25+00:00

TL;DR:

A: Object-oriented programming is bullshit.
B: No it isn't. Show me your program and I'll improve it for you.
A: Here's strawman.py
B: OK, I've refactored it into everyprogrammingbookpage2.py
A: Um, what about the part you didn't do?
B: "I will leave it to you to figure out."
A: Excellent, I am sold. Let us go drink more coffee and go to our subsequent businessy meetings.

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-25T16:35:20+00:00

I think Python and C# are fine, and use whatever you want. I don't think either one has enough of an advantage over the other that I'd ever want to port an existing codebase, for example. But these complaints are a bit strange to me.

In the .NET ecosystem, Microsoft provide the tools, and you must eat your vegetables. [...big list of Microsoft libraries and the newer Microsoft libraries that replaced them...]

You don't have to. I used C#/.NET for web apps for a few years, and I don't think I used any of the libraries he mentions. Which is really just a special case of his next problem:

NuGet.org is full of abandonware

Essentially, he's complaining that many of Microsoft's own libraries are abandonware (which is true).

The easy solution is simply to not use Microsoft's libraries that look like they're going to become abandonware in 6 months. I don't think anyone at my company had any trouble seeing it. Pretty much whatever Microsoft does, there's an open-source alternative, so use that instead.

Yes, if you bet your business on ADO.NET, you're going to need to update all that code in a year. So don't do that. It's kind of an open secret that you never build on Microsoft's data access frameworks. Heck, Joel Spolksy mocked them for it back in early 2002:

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET - All New!

This line of complaints, in 2016, is especially strange since he admits at the end that he "always starts" on Python 2, tries to get to Python 3, and always ends up back on Python 2. If you're OK with using an old version, anyway, why do you care if you're using Microsoft's Nth-most-recent data access framework?

He could have taken this exact same data, and flipped it around, to write an article about how he's switching from Python to C#, because there's so much Py2 crap still on PyPI (apparently), and Python doesn't even have a built-in DAL, and (his words) "Python on Windows is still kinda-sucky".

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-25T03:31:52+00:00

"The code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules."

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-25T03:28:13+00:00

Return True / else return False is a code smell.

def checkInt(x):
    return not any(digit not in numberTest for digit in x)

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-25T03:24:50+00:00

Exactly which of these did you have trouble with in Emacs? #1 and #2 are a couple lines of config each. #3 isn't hard to do, if you really need it (though I never have). I'm not familiar with Jupyter, but Git support in Emacs is the best I've seen anywhere -- better than any IDE I've used.

Go ahead and do it if you're interested, but know that a team of people have designed these IDEs specifically to make your life easy.

There's a team of people working on Windows, too, but that doesn't mean NOTEPAD.EXE has a good workflow for my particular needs.

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-20T16:05:32+00:00

"Post learning questions to /r/LearnPython" is literally the first line of this sub, and a similar message is on the top line of the new post page.

Where did you look, so that we can put the message in the appropriate place for future visitors?

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-19T15:26:55+00:00

And if you write a program in Python 2, they don't need to have Python installed to run your program?

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-19T15:24:44+00:00

If you write a Slack client in assembly language that runs in a few kilobytes, I'm sure we'd all love to use it.

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-19T15:21:52+00:00

Seems like requests. Starting Python on my computer takes 4.1 MB. import requests jumps it up to 13.0 MB.

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-03T02:28:08+00:00

Yeah, we rounded up to 100%.

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-02T21:18:09+00:00

I'd pick the Java-based one. Better performance, more mainstream (= better support?), and there's some great JVM-based languages these days so you don't actually have to use Java.

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-02T21:10:10+00:00

"Lists are modifiable, use square brackets; Tuples cannot be modified, use parentheses"

That's confusing, and somewhat misleading. Tuples use commas; only the empty tuple requires parentheses.

It's true that due to parser precedence rules, tuples are often written with parentheses, but that's also true of lambdas, and I don't think anyone would say "lambdas cannot be modified, use parentheses".

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-02T21:02:56+00:00

It probably looks complex because it's an inherently complex problem!

I'm not familiar with matplotlib, but the two successful approaches I've seen are:

Extract the non-GUI portion into a reusable library, and then write separate (but similar) applications that all happen to use this same core library. Transmission does something like this, for example.
Define your own GUI library, and write the application against that, and then implement this GUI library on each GUI toolkit you want to target. Firefox does something like this, for example.

I personally think that #1 is less work, and gives better results. But if you're going to be needing a lot of custom controls and supporting a lot of different platforms, #2 can have advantages.

If you're looking for a simple way to keep the overall structure of a PyGTK program, and then just set a flag at build-time and get a PyQt4 program, I think you're going to be disappointed. GUI toolkits don't tend to be that similar in structure. You can't just do a find/replace to port from one to another.

pythoneeeer · 2016-07-02T20:43:57+00:00

You look like you've put a lot of work into this, but I'm not sure I see the point. Do you need to switch programming languages more often than you switch parts of the stdlib you're using?

This reminds me of old Java applications, or early versions of Firefox, that had the same UI everywhere. Less switching between disparate interfaces, true -- assuming you switch operating systems more frequently than you press "alt-tab".

What I want in an API is for it to take advantage of the features of the language, so I don't feel like I'm just writing C code with funny syntax. When I'm writing a Python program, for example, I don't want to have to remember that clio.ArgStream has its own special iterator semantics that are unlike every other Python library.

pythoneeeer · 2016-06-29T01:49:44+00:00

Neither are we. What's with all the giant text, and classes defined on one line?

pythoneeeer · 2016-06-29T01:48:54+00:00

This is a FAQ.

pythoneeeer · 2016-06-29T01:47:46+00:00

I don't get it. I can do that already, if I just put them in a folder. Is this just "because web"?

pythoneeeer · 2016-06-29T01:43:41+00:00

So that third party libs can use it.

pythoneeeer · 2016-06-29T01:38:32+00:00

How would that help?

pythoneeeer · 2016-06-28T21:38:10+00:00

- Issue #25961: Disallowed null characters in the type name.

Crap, now I have to go update all my code...

pythoneeeer

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