13 ms·

Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

138 points by mikeckennedy 10y ago

nkantar 10y ago
I've only started this particular episode, but the Talk Python to Me podcast is pretty stellar and has contributed a lot to my addiction to technical podcasts.
- kmonsoor 10y ago
  if you're into Node, then try: http://nodeup.com/ http://nodeup.com/ i liked it quite a lot
DodgyEggplant 10y ago
After years with Python, it's still a mystery to me how the same constructs are so intuitive and readable in Python (think it acceptable that they are less in C++, Java or javascript etc, even Ruby)
- pmontra 10y ago
  It might depend on your previous history. My development arc was C, Perl, Java, Ruby, Python with Javascript in parallel. Python is not particularly intuitive after 10 years of Ruby. Actually it's a mistery to me how people can like such a complicated language. However I got only customers using Python last year so I must make me like it at least a little. I keep thinking I could have been very unlucky and found some Java projects instead.
  - preordained 10y ago
    Yup. I'm with you. For my money, Ruby could fill exactly the space Python does and do it better...but Python has too much steam in its niche and Ruby got pigeon-holed as a web language; such is life.
    - sametmax 10y ago
      The reason it happened that way is the community. The python one valued doc, robustness, readability and stability. The ruby one loved cleverness, beautiful design and conventions. Eventually they ended up meeting at the middle, but in the mean time, people got tired of : - having the last monkey patch breaking their code - having to try to understand the last crazy dsl somebody came up with - having an incomplete out of data doc and no tests - having gem install breaks on you randomly - having to mess with rvm (still an issue though) which never seems to do quite what you want Ruby is a good language, but it took too much type to come out of it's teen years, playing bold and teasing. Now it's too late. JS is getting away with it, despite being way inferior to ruby, because it's the only language on the web platform and we are forced to use it. Ruby didn't have this chance.
  - anentropic 10y ago
    It's just what you know, coming from the other direction I found Ruby ugly and plenty of warts of its own. But I'm aware this is just a subjective impression and they're broadly very similar.
daveguy 10y ago
The unofficial python 2.8 is here: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon
- greyman 10y ago
  But didn't Guido say that everything what could be backported was already backported? > There are a small handful of backwards incompatibilities introduced by Tauthon. How to understand this? Anyway, something like this was expected to happen. I wonder if it wouldn't be better if Guido would not halt python 2 development and just let it evolve.
  - dorkygator 10y ago
    He left the door open for the community to continue work on Python 2. It looks like somebody took up that offer.
    - greyman 10y ago
      Yes and no. Community can continue, but only under different name. So only fork is allowed.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mkesper 10y ago
    This discussion goes now on since Python 3 was released. Python 2 will not be supported or developed after 2020.
    - greyman 10y ago
      Yes, I know. The question is if this decision is correct, given that apparently a lot of people and companies just doesn't plan to switch no matter what.
Rapzid 10y ago
I've recently had to start writing python professionally and I'm not super impressed. My previous python experience was writing small services and fixing others code. Now that I'm working on larger "apps" it feels like a 90's language with all the rough edges and warts. I'd rather being working in a language with better language services and tooling, but python has numpy and all these data viz libraries so whatcha gonna do? At least I get a little reprieve with TypeScript; never thought I'd be so happy to work with the node platform, but there you have it. 3.5 looks attractive but there are just fundamental issues with the lang and language services. It's a bit like lipstick o... Well, I'm not going to say it.
- mkesper 10y ago
  What do you mean by "language services and tooling"? Python 3.5+ supports gradual typing, too so I'd be interested in a real comparison to Typescript.
  - Zancarius 10y ago
    I'm wondering if the OP is referring at least partially to the state of Python packaging. There was an HN article just a couple weeks ago, I think, along these lines that may be contributing to the complaint. It seems odd to me given that pip has improved rather dramatically over the last 1-2 years (at least on *nix), so perhaps you're right regarding typing.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  Try PyCharm if you need that kind of support. I'm usually happy with just pyflakes and linters.
  - vosper 10y ago
    Pycharm tries really hard to paper over the lack of static typing in Python. Variable/function refactoring works mostly, code completion is acceptable (especially if you're inside a specially supported-framework like Django) and sometimes it'll show up a type error before your tests fail, saving you the time it takes up setup the test db, run the tests etc... I love Pycharm, and I think people who go without IDE support are masochists (I did it for a few years with Python, and I'm not going back) but it's not like the kind of tooling support you get from a proper statically typed language, where the IDE can do so much to help you. And I say this as someone who's been full time in Python for years. It's a fun language to write, with a wonderful ecosystem, but it's not good enough when your codebase gets big or you need to do major refactoring.
howfun 10y ago
Any chance for a text version?
- jgill 10y ago
  The text is up and part of the audio as well.
  - mikeckennedy 10y ago
    Yep, thanks J. You can find it in the player: https://talkpython.fm/100 https://talkpython.fm/100 Or directly here: https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/100/python-past-present-and-future-with-guido-van-rossum https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/100/python-past-pr...
sametmax 10y ago
I've made a living of Python since 2.4 and hitting the 3.6, here is my take on it: The Python team does an incredible job at making the language evolve. This is a 20+ years old language, with billions of lines written in the world, and allowing a huge number of paradigms. It still matures, steals ideas, makes hard compromise on growth vs compat, etc. I know very few other techs that can even compare to this level of legacy/flexibility. E.G: the current debate on the mailling list about the "delayed" keyword: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-February/044682.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-February... (Python-idea is a fantastic mailling list BTW. You learn a lot about programming, community management, Python and humans. It's very approachable, yet you read some very talented people. Sign up ! https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas) Coding in 2.x is now a pain. You can't see that if you are stuck in 2.7. 3.X doesn't seems appealing because what it brings on the table is not shinny. But the hundreds of small fixes hugely add up, and the experience is not the same at all on any project that takes more than a few days. The good things is, Python 3 won. Nobody starts a new project in 2.x, most important 3rd party libs are have been converted and legacy code is ported every day. Porting a big code base is not really hard (2to3, python-future and python-six do most of the work) and can take only a few hours if you know what you are doing. Which is nothing given Guido have us 15 years to do it. Honestly I had more time porting from Django 1.5 to 1.9 and DRF 1 to 2. Python 3.6 is a wonderful release and a bliss to use. pathlib, f-string, better error handling, absolute imports, diminished verbosity, transparent unicode support, stable asyncio, unpacking everywhere, improved windows support, wheels for so many things, subprocess pools, pip+venv included (although debians admin excluded them, grrrr)... Everytime you go back to an earlier version it feels clunky. The problem is, there are very few tutorials showing you the current best practices. I still read plenty of .format(), os.path.join(), manual subprocess/threads handling, etc. People are still complaining you can't provide a standalone Python program while nuikta have been compiling very well Python for years now. It's even yum/apt installable. Whether you are in Python 2 or 3 though, the ecosystem makes it all. I'm amazed at where I find Python these days. It's the official language for colleges in France, it's installed on Linux and Mac by default, on the raspi (en consequently a recommended language for all students in the UK). It's at Google, Facebook, Instagram, Apple, Disney/Pixar, Sony, the CNES, the NASA, Mozilla, Docker... But also in very heterogeneous places. Blender uses it to script, but most GIS as well. I got clients from everywhere using it: mathematicians, physicists, geographers, sysadmin, bankers, big data analysts, deep learning researchers... In big and small ways. Plus there are so many great 3rd party tools: requests, django, sqlalchemy, numpy, pendulum, begins, jupyter, httpie, faker, marshmallow, autobahn, crossbar, pew are fantastic. But how do you discover those ? The ecosystem is so huge, even curated lists such as https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python are intimidating. On strengh of Python is that it's good a little script upt to big projects. but there is an enormous list of things to learn if you want to get out of the scripter mind set and start coding a big project. - virtualenv. Wait virtualenvwrapper ? Wait pew ? wait pip ? wait conda ? - tox, coverall, pytest, flake8, pylint, bandit... - Python path, modules, __stuff__... And the packaging is still a mess. It's hard to make a setup.py file for a newcommer. And the 1000 files next to it. It's hard to make a compiled extension wheel. To provide a msi, a deb or a dmg. It's hard to do desktop or mobile UI. Kivy and PyQT are nowhere as easy as creating a website, which says it all. Mypy and type hints are not mature enough. Really a pain to use. I would not recommend it right now. Also VSCode and PyCharm makes everything better. I'm a sublime text guy, but the competition rocked it on this one. Asyncio is super low level. Most people should probably just not use it, it's designed to dev high level libs, not to code your service yourself. And most high level libs using it are not mature. The revolution hasn't happened yet, and we need it to happen in the next 2 years. MeteorsJS is here and kicking. JS has the Webpack ecosystem (which sucks, but provide features you don't have in pure Python right now). You see more and more stack with Sass + es 6 + jsx + whatever and the Python tools to do it don't cut it. So you are back to JS. I hate JS. Hosting a Python website is still too complicated. pythonanywhere.com comes close, but beginners want PHP + FTP kind of deployments, and you can't blame them. Not everybody needs the robustness of our pro stacks. Performances, though, has never been an issue for me. I know some people that have indeed the need for it, but my experience is that they are a rare breed. Most people complaining about it want a pony, they don't have a Python performance problem. Nevertheless, I look forward for the gilectomy just to stop hearing the FUD. But I'm not holding my breath. I have more hopes for Pyjion, the Microsoft JIT, though. Their approach is the sanest I've seen. Pypy is nice, but is having a hard time by design. Pyston is dead. Free perf is like free pizza. You don't need it, but hey, free pizza! Also I have a feeling that rust and Python will be very good friends in the future...
mianos 10y ago
I liked the bit where he said he underestimated the number of people and code using python 2.7. I often hear python 3.X has 99% penetration based on probably the same bogus metrics, like downloads from python.com. Then they go on to talk about how many exciting changes are being made to python 3. Some of us actually have work to do.

138 points by mikeckennedy 10y ago

I've only started this particular episode, but the Talk Python to Me podcast is pretty stellar and has contributed a lot to my addiction to technical podcasts.

kmonsoor 10y ago
if you're into Node, then try: http://nodeup.com/ http://nodeup.com/ i liked it quite a lot

DodgyEggplant 10y ago

After years with Python, it's still a mystery to me how the same constructs are so intuitive and readable in Python (think it acceptable that they are less in C++, Java or javascript etc, even Ruby)

pmontra 10y ago
It might depend on your previous history. My development arc was C, Perl, Java, Ruby, Python with Javascript in parallel. Python is not particularly intuitive after 10 years of Ruby. Actually it's a mistery to me how people can like such a complicated language. However I got only customers using Python last year so I must make me like it at least a little. I keep thinking I could have been very unlucky and found some Java projects instead.
- preordained 10y ago
  Yup. I'm with you. For my money, Ruby could fill exactly the space Python does and do it better...but Python has too much steam in its niche and Ruby got pigeon-holed as a web language; such is life.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    The reason it happened that way is the community. The python one valued doc, robustness, readability and stability. The ruby one loved cleverness, beautiful design and conventions. Eventually they ended up meeting at the middle, but in the mean time, people got tired of : - having the last monkey patch breaking their code - having to try to understand the last crazy dsl somebody came up with - having an incomplete out of data doc and no tests - having gem install breaks on you randomly - having to mess with rvm (still an issue though) which never seems to do quite what you want Ruby is a good language, but it took too much type to come out of it's teen years, playing bold and teasing. Now it's too late. JS is getting away with it, despite being way inferior to ruby, because it's the only language on the web platform and we are forced to use it. Ruby didn't have this chance.
- anentropic 10y ago
  It's just what you know, coming from the other direction I found Ruby ugly and plenty of warts of its own. But I'm aware this is just a subjective impression and they're broadly very similar.

daveguy 10y ago

The unofficial python 2.8 is here: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

greyman 10y ago
But didn't Guido say that everything what could be backported was already backported? > There are a small handful of backwards incompatibilities introduced by Tauthon. How to understand this? Anyway, something like this was expected to happen. I wonder if it wouldn't be better if Guido would not halt python 2 development and just let it evolve.
- dorkygator 10y ago
  He left the door open for the community to continue work on Python 2. It looks like somebody took up that offer.
  - greyman 10y ago
    Yes and no. Community can continue, but only under different name. So only fork is allowed.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mkesper 10y ago
  This discussion goes now on since Python 3 was released. Python 2 will not be supported or developed after 2020.
  - greyman 10y ago
    Yes, I know. The question is if this decision is correct, given that apparently a lot of people and companies just doesn't plan to switch no matter what.

Rapzid 10y ago

I've recently had to start writing python professionally and I'm not super impressed. My previous python experience was writing small services and fixing others code. Now that I'm working on larger "apps" it feels like a 90's language with all the rough edges and warts. I'd rather being working in a language with better language services and tooling, but python has numpy and all these data viz libraries so whatcha gonna do? At least I get a little reprieve with TypeScript; never thought I'd be so happy to work with the node platform, but there you have it. 3.5 looks attractive but there are just fundamental issues with the lang and language services. It's a bit like lipstick o... Well, I'm not going to say it.

mkesper 10y ago
What do you mean by "language services and tooling"? Python 3.5+ supports gradual typing, too so I'd be interested in a real comparison to Typescript.
- Zancarius 10y ago
  I'm wondering if the OP is referring at least partially to the state of Python packaging. There was an HN article just a couple weeks ago, I think, along these lines that may be contributing to the complaint. It seems odd to me given that pip has improved rather dramatically over the last 1-2 years (at least on *nix), so perhaps you're right regarding typing.
mixmastamyk 10y ago
Try PyCharm if you need that kind of support. I'm usually happy with just pyflakes and linters.
- vosper 10y ago
  Pycharm tries really hard to paper over the lack of static typing in Python. Variable/function refactoring works mostly, code completion is acceptable (especially if you're inside a specially supported-framework like Django) and sometimes it'll show up a type error before your tests fail, saving you the time it takes up setup the test db, run the tests etc... I love Pycharm, and I think people who go without IDE support are masochists (I did it for a few years with Python, and I'm not going back) but it's not like the kind of tooling support you get from a proper statically typed language, where the IDE can do so much to help you. And I say this as someone who's been full time in Python for years. It's a fun language to write, with a wonderful ecosystem, but it's not good enough when your codebase gets big or you need to do major refactoring.

howfun 10y ago

Any chance for a text version?

jgill 10y ago
The text is up and part of the audio as well.
- mikeckennedy 10y ago
  Yep, thanks J. You can find it in the player: https://talkpython.fm/100 https://talkpython.fm/100 Or directly here: https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/100/python-past-present-and-future-with-guido-van-rossum https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/100/python-past-pr...

sametmax 10y ago

I've made a living of Python since 2.4 and hitting the 3.6, here is my take on it: The Python team does an incredible job at making the language evolve. This is a 20+ years old language, with billions of lines written in the world, and allowing a huge number of paradigms. It still matures, steals ideas, makes hard compromise on growth vs compat, etc. I know very few other techs that can even compare to this level of legacy/flexibility. E.G: the current debate on the mailling list about the "delayed" keyword: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-February/044682.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-February... (Python-idea is a fantastic mailling list BTW. You learn a lot about programming, community management, Python and humans. It's very approachable, yet you read some very talented people. Sign up ! https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas) Coding in 2.x is now a pain. You can't see that if you are stuck in 2.7. 3.X doesn't seems appealing because what it brings on the table is not shinny. But the hundreds of small fixes hugely add up, and the experience is not the same at all on any project that takes more than a few days. The good things is, Python 3 won. Nobody starts a new project in 2.x, most important 3rd party libs are have been converted and legacy code is ported every day. Porting a big code base is not really hard (2to3, python-future and python-six do most of the work) and can take only a few hours if you know what you are doing. Which is nothing given Guido have us 15 years to do it. Honestly I had more time porting from Django 1.5 to 1.9 and DRF 1 to 2. Python 3.6 is a wonderful release and a bliss to use. pathlib, f-string, better error handling, absolute imports, diminished verbosity, transparent unicode support, stable asyncio, unpacking everywhere, improved windows support, wheels for so many things, subprocess pools, pip+venv included (although debians admin excluded them, grrrr)... Everytime you go back to an earlier version it feels clunky. The problem is, there are very few tutorials showing you the current best practices. I still read plenty of .format(), os.path.join(), manual subprocess/threads handling, etc. People are still complaining you can't provide a standalone Python program while nuikta have been compiling very well Python for years now. It's even yum/apt installable. Whether you are in Python 2 or 3 though, the ecosystem makes it all. I'm amazed at where I find Python these days. It's the official language for colleges in France, it's installed on Linux and Mac by default, on the raspi (en consequently a recommended language for all students in the UK). It's at Google, Facebook, Instagram, Apple, Disney/Pixar, Sony, the CNES, the NASA, Mozilla, Docker... But also in very heterogeneous places. Blender uses it to script, but most GIS as well. I got clients from everywhere using it: mathematicians, physicists, geographers, sysadmin, bankers, big data analysts, deep learning researchers... In big and small ways. Plus there are so many great 3rd party tools: requests, django, sqlalchemy, numpy, pendulum, begins, jupyter, httpie, faker, marshmallow, autobahn, crossbar, pew are fantastic. But how do you discover those ? The ecosystem is so huge, even curated lists such as https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python are intimidating. On strengh of Python is that it's good a little script upt to big projects. but there is an enormous list of things to learn if you want to get out of the scripter mind set and start coding a big project. - virtualenv. Wait virtualenvwrapper ? Wait pew ? wait pip ? wait conda ? - tox, coverall, pytest, flake8, pylint, bandit... - Python path, modules, __stuff__... And the packaging is still a mess. It's hard to make a setup.py file for a newcommer. And the 1000 files next to it. It's hard to make a compiled extension wheel. To provide a msi, a deb or a dmg. It's hard to do desktop or mobile UI. Kivy and PyQT are nowhere as easy as creating a website, which says it all. Mypy and type hints are not mature enough. Really a pain to use. I would not recommend it right now. Also VSCode and PyCharm makes everything better. I'm a sublime text guy, but the competition rocked it on this one. Asyncio is super low level. Most people should probably just not use it, it's designed to dev high level libs, not to code your service yourself. And most high level libs using it are not mature. The revolution hasn't happened yet, and we need it to happen in the next 2 years. MeteorsJS is here and kicking. JS has the Webpack ecosystem (which sucks, but provide features you don't have in pure Python right now). You see more and more stack with Sass + es 6 + jsx + whatever and the Python tools to do it don't cut it. So you are back to JS. I hate JS. Hosting a Python website is still too complicated. pythonanywhere.com comes close, but beginners want PHP + FTP kind of deployments, and you can't blame them. Not everybody needs the robustness of our pro stacks. Performances, though, has never been an issue for me. I know some people that have indeed the need for it, but my experience is that they are a rare breed. Most people complaining about it want a pony, they don't have a Python performance problem. Nevertheless, I look forward for the gilectomy just to stop hearing the FUD. But I'm not holding my breath. I have more hopes for Pyjion, the Microsoft JIT, though. Their approach is the sanest I've seen. Pypy is nice, but is having a hard time by design. Pyston is dead. Free perf is like free pizza. You don't need it, but hey, free pizza! Also I have a feeling that rust and Python will be very good friends in the future...

mianos 10y ago

I liked the bit where he said he underestimated the number of people and code using python 2.7. I often hear python 3.X has 99% penetration based on probably the same bogus metrics, like downloads from python.com. Then they go on to talk about how many exciting changes are being made to python 3. Some of us actually have work to do.