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Python fixes maintenance. You know that sinking feeling when you crack open 3-year-old code written by your predecessor's predecessor and realize it's a load o

Python fixes maintenance. You know that sinking feeling when you crack open 3-year-old code written by your predecessor's predecessor and realize it's a load of garbage and that you'll never be able to fix the bug? Yeah, well, with Python that doesn't happen. At least, not at all frequently. Python forces you to spend a bit more time up-front and then saves you time each and every time you need to read, edit, or improve your code. People choose Python for the same reasons they choose good testing practices. Python's a mature language for mature developers who want to produce mature software.

j_baker 16y ago
I'm willing to bet you haven't seen a lot of Zope 2 code. :-)
- blasdel 16y ago
  Given that he developed Django, the framework that thankfully euthanized Zope, he's probably seen things us people wouldn't believe.
eru 16y ago
You might want to have a look at Haskell, if you like this trade-off of making writing somewhat more complicated but reading much simpler. Also if you browse some PEPS (and other sources) you will find that Python and Haskell's history are more intertwined that one would guess at first.
joe24pack 16y ago
Can you go into more detail about how Python fixes maintenance? I'm really curious what language features of Python are conducive to good or easy maintenance, and how those features are unique to Python. Color me skeptical, but I can be convinced.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  I'm really curious what language features of Python are conducive to good or easy maintenance My guess is that "Less is More" in this situation. Python often does tend to read like pseudocode. The problem with this, though, is that idiocy has seemingly infinite resources on its side. Occasionally, you will have an outlier who has vast holes in their understanding of programming and writes large amounts of jaw-dropping bad code and can do this even in simple elegant languages. In fact, there's one on the team I'm working with right now. (He was maneuvered onto the testing team to mitigate the damage.)
  - chromatic 16y ago
    Occasionally, you will have an outlier who has vast holes in their understanding of programming and writes large amounts of jaw-dropping bad code and can do this even in simple elegant languages. One interesting quirk of Python is that such code superficially resembles good code in everything except the length of functions and methods.
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      Perhaps not always a good thing. Kent Beck's preferred Smalltalk indentation style made good Smalltalk look good, and bad Smalltalk look really bad. That's actually useful.
      - eru 16y ago
        Could you please elaborate?
  - joe24pack 16y ago
    As far as "Less is More" goes, this could be practiced in other languages by voluntarily choosing a simpler subset of features in a language with a complex feature set. Think RISC style in CISC architecture.
- jacobian 16y ago
  > Can you go into more detail about how Python fixes maintenance? It's pervasive, so there isn't any single feature I could point to. Python embraces a general philosophy that starts from the observation that programmers spend much more time reading code then they spend time writing it [1]. Thus, most trade-offs between readability and writability should fall in favor of readability. For instance, let's look at the whitespace thing. It's the first thing new Python users bump up against, and it's a source of perpetual controversy. There's a not-insignificant group of users who try Python, hit whitespace-for-control-flow, and leave in a huff. I won't argue that these people are wrong, but I will point out that it's ridiculously nice to have all the code you read always use the same control flow indentation conventions. Though Python's my primary language, I do more and more work in JavaScript theses days, and I could go on and on about my frustration trying to follow the flow of code written with varying intendation, brace, and semicolon styles. This is encapsulated by the observation, from The Zen of Python, that "there should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it" (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/). At its best, Python code eliminates any stylistic differences. This sounds like it's a stifling of creativity (and perhaps it is), but in practice it means maintaining someone else's code is just as easy as maintaining your own. Take Django, for example: I can tell at a glance who's responsible for any given line of JavaScript in the framework, but it usually takes digging into SVN history to discover who's written some given line of Python [2]. Or look at Python's general lack of language features. There's a `while` loop but no `do ... while`. There's a `for` loop, but it's really just `foreach` and nothing else. There's `if/else`, but no `switch/case`. There's language-level primitives for basic types list, dicts and tuples, but not regexes, ranges, heredocs, or anything else more exotic. Python's a little language; I can keep it all in my head. I never have to run to the docs to find out what some obscure syntax does; there isn't any obscure syntax. If I got to do green-fields development all of the time, I might very well choose a different language. I've certainly used languages that are easier to write. But I live in a world filled with old code, so I've tried to make sure my career involves code that sucks as little as possible. [1] Indeed, I'd argue that reading code — especially other people's — is the most important skill a developer can have. I'd go so far as to argue that asking people to write code during interviews is pointless; we should be asking them to read it. But that's another show. [2] I'm often surprised to find that the code was written by me, though I'm not sure if that's a praise of Python or a remark on my generally shitty memory… [3] Well, until Python 3. Again, that's another show.
bad_user 16y ago
> well, with Python that doesn't happen. At least, not at all frequently. That's a bold statement. It happened to me just last week. The difference from Perl is that common tasks are standardized ... stuff like OOP is built-in, so you don't have to chose or stay in touch with several frameworks for doing OOP, and you could care less about integration issues between modules that use different OOP systems. It also has a clean syntax, which makes (good code, written by good developers) readable ... but that's not what bugs me about Perl ... after all, why should you read text in some language (natural or not) if you haven't bothered to learn it? That's about it. Otherwise I'm beginning to hate Python's limitations.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Sad to say it, but given enough programmer ambition, eventually any language is going to annoy you this way!
- infinite8s 16y ago
  Can you elaborate on what python limitations really frustrate you?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - bad_user 16y ago
    My opinion very subjective ... I'm looking for 2 things out of a programming language ... 1) (proper) anonymous code blocks ... it's the only sane way to have declarative APIs, although I've found for some tasks that Python's features (like decorators, meta-classes) are enough ... but not for all things I want to do 2) a limited form of macro support ... like, I want to get the syntax-tree out of a closure, instead of a reference to the compiled method ... to abstract the way some processing takes place. In Python you can workaround it with some magic (a la Django's ORM), but I love to be able to write Python syntax for those queries (e.g. something like Linq) ... and have for example a unified querying interface for collections of data
IgorPartola 16y ago
OTOH C is a more difficult language to use, so it takes a certain level of care to write in it. Does that mean that any working C program is readable and maintainable as long as you crossed that threshold and now know how to read and write C?

j_baker 16y ago

I'm willing to bet you haven't seen a lot of Zope 2 code. :-)

blasdel 16y ago
Given that he developed Django, the framework that thankfully euthanized Zope, he's probably seen things us people wouldn't believe.

eru 16y ago

You might want to have a look at Haskell, if you like this trade-off of making writing somewhat more complicated but reading much simpler. Also if you browse some PEPS (and other sources) you will find that Python and Haskell's history are more intertwined that one would guess at first.

joe24pack 16y ago

Can you go into more detail about how Python fixes maintenance? I'm really curious what language features of Python are conducive to good or easy maintenance, and how those features are unique to Python. Color me skeptical, but I can be convinced.

stcredzero 16y ago
I'm really curious what language features of Python are conducive to good or easy maintenance My guess is that "Less is More" in this situation. Python often does tend to read like pseudocode. The problem with this, though, is that idiocy has seemingly infinite resources on its side. Occasionally, you will have an outlier who has vast holes in their understanding of programming and writes large amounts of jaw-dropping bad code and can do this even in simple elegant languages. In fact, there's one on the team I'm working with right now. (He was maneuvered onto the testing team to mitigate the damage.)
- chromatic 16y ago
  Occasionally, you will have an outlier who has vast holes in their understanding of programming and writes large amounts of jaw-dropping bad code and can do this even in simple elegant languages. One interesting quirk of Python is that such code superficially resembles good code in everything except the length of functions and methods.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Perhaps not always a good thing. Kent Beck's preferred Smalltalk indentation style made good Smalltalk look good, and bad Smalltalk look really bad. That's actually useful.
    - eru 16y ago
      Could you please elaborate?
- joe24pack 16y ago
  As far as "Less is More" goes, this could be practiced in other languages by voluntarily choosing a simpler subset of features in a language with a complex feature set. Think RISC style in CISC architecture.
jacobian 16y ago
> Can you go into more detail about how Python fixes maintenance? It's pervasive, so there isn't any single feature I could point to. Python embraces a general philosophy that starts from the observation that programmers spend much more time reading code then they spend time writing it [1]. Thus, most trade-offs between readability and writability should fall in favor of readability. For instance, let's look at the whitespace thing. It's the first thing new Python users bump up against, and it's a source of perpetual controversy. There's a not-insignificant group of users who try Python, hit whitespace-for-control-flow, and leave in a huff. I won't argue that these people are wrong, but I will point out that it's ridiculously nice to have all the code you read always use the same control flow indentation conventions. Though Python's my primary language, I do more and more work in JavaScript theses days, and I could go on and on about my frustration trying to follow the flow of code written with varying intendation, brace, and semicolon styles. This is encapsulated by the observation, from The Zen of Python, that "there should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it" (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/). At its best, Python code eliminates any stylistic differences. This sounds like it's a stifling of creativity (and perhaps it is), but in practice it means maintaining someone else's code is just as easy as maintaining your own. Take Django, for example: I can tell at a glance who's responsible for any given line of JavaScript in the framework, but it usually takes digging into SVN history to discover who's written some given line of Python [2]. Or look at Python's general lack of language features. There's a `while` loop but no `do ... while`. There's a `for` loop, but it's really just `foreach` and nothing else. There's `if/else`, but no `switch/case`. There's language-level primitives for basic types list, dicts and tuples, but not regexes, ranges, heredocs, or anything else more exotic. Python's a little language; I can keep it all in my head. I never have to run to the docs to find out what some obscure syntax does; there isn't any obscure syntax. If I got to do green-fields development all of the time, I might very well choose a different language. I've certainly used languages that are easier to write. But I live in a world filled with old code, so I've tried to make sure my career involves code that sucks as little as possible. [1] Indeed, I'd argue that reading code — especially other people's — is the most important skill a developer can have. I'd go so far as to argue that asking people to write code during interviews is pointless; we should be asking them to read it. But that's another show. [2] I'm often surprised to find that the code was written by me, though I'm not sure if that's a praise of Python or a remark on my generally shitty memory… [3] Well, until Python 3. Again, that's another show.

bad_user 16y ago

> well, with Python that doesn't happen. At least, not at all frequently. That's a bold statement. It happened to me just last week. The difference from Perl is that common tasks are standardized ... stuff like OOP is built-in, so you don't have to chose or stay in touch with several frameworks for doing OOP, and you could care less about integration issues between modules that use different OOP systems. It also has a clean syntax, which makes (good code, written by good developers) readable ... but that's not what bugs me about Perl ... after all, why should you read text in some language (natural or not) if you haven't bothered to learn it? That's about it. Otherwise I'm beginning to hate Python's limitations.

stcredzero 16y ago
Sad to say it, but given enough programmer ambition, eventually any language is going to annoy you this way!
infinite8s 16y ago
Can you elaborate on what python limitations really frustrate you?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- bad_user 16y ago
  My opinion very subjective ... I'm looking for 2 things out of a programming language ... 1) (proper) anonymous code blocks ... it's the only sane way to have declarative APIs, although I've found for some tasks that Python's features (like decorators, meta-classes) are enough ... but not for all things I want to do 2) a limited form of macro support ... like, I want to get the syntax-tree out of a closure, instead of a reference to the compiled method ... to abstract the way some processing takes place. In Python you can workaround it with some magic (a la Django's ORM), but I love to be able to write Python syntax for those queries (e.g. something like Linq) ... and have for example a unified querying interface for collections of data

IgorPartola 16y ago

OTOH C is a more difficult language to use, so it takes a certain level of care to write in it. Does that mean that any working C program is readable and maintainable as long as you crossed that threshold and now know how to read and write C?