4 ms·
Python feels to me like a nifty little language that's been asked to do to much and had too much cobbled onto it, bending it all out of whack. I have some fond
by douche 9y ago
Python feels to me like a nifty little language that's been asked to do to much and had too much cobbled onto it, bending it all out of whack.
I have some fond memories of hacking around with it, about 10 years ago - although for some context, I was coming out of the wastelands of Visual Basic, pre-modern C++, and AWT/Swing era Java. I'm not sure there's anything easier for quick and dirty 2D game development than the PyGame SDL bindings were.
But I'd cringe at the thought of building anything serious with it today. It feels too loose and sloppy, like trying to build a castle made of sand, although I might have some Stockholm syndrome from years of more static, more strongly typed languages. But I have to do enough grepping around through the code base now to make sure tweaking something isn't going to break some snippet of JS code on the front-end now; I really don't need to be worried about that on the back-end too.
- sametmax 9y agoYou have type hints in Python now. With Pycharm as an IDE, you will feel right at home.
- scardine 9y agoHappy customer of Jetbrains as well, they make great IDEs if you have lots of RAM to spare.
- BuckRogers 9y agoThose are ignored by the Python bytecode compiler though, and aren't used to enhance performance or anything else. If you don't mind type annotations that are for the IDE only you may as well just reach for TypeScript instead of Python.
- sametmax 9y ago> Those are ignored by the Python bytecode compiler though That's the whole point. > you may as well just reach for TypeScript instead of Python. The only reason I do JS is because it's the only browser native language we got. I'm never gona use this aweful tech anywhere else if I can.
- BuckRogers 9y ago> That's the whole point. It is? I don't think so. My whole point was that they're useless from a performance perspective. >The only reason I do JS is because it's the only browser native language we got. I'm never gona use this aweful tech anywhere else if I can. That's why TypeScript exists. It's better than older versions of ECMAScript and Python, put together.
- Demiurge 9y agoIt might feel like a building a castle out of sand, without context, but it's very often like building a castle with from castles import CastleWithMoat c = CastleWithMoat('eyy') It's just not meant to replace C++, but I think it beats php, perl, R, and lots of things in readability and package coverage. It lets me do GIS, number crunching, and web serving all in one system. Equivalent functionality in Python is a fraction of lines of complexity implementing from scratch in "strongly typed serious code", for a huge swath of problems.
- hpcjoe 9y agoI am going to disagree with the "it beats php, perl, R, and lots of things in readability and package coverage". PHP maybe, but Perl, R, etc. are quite readable. Often I find digging into others Python code, that it is written with a somewhat peculiar manner, making it difficult to reason about what the code is supposed to be doing. I'd recommend Julia (http://julialang.org http://julialang.org) for anyone looking at new projects where Python is an option. Similar syntax, though saner code structure (e.g. no tabs/spaces issues), compiled, strongly typed. All around an excellent language.
- newen 9y agoJust in time compiled. Not really compiled compiled.
- zenhack 9y agoI think this is pretty insightful. You won't find this kind of post about shells on my blog, despite being much worse for building "real software." Stuff like autotools is an exception, and I think it kinda enforces the point. I'd be much less annoyed with python if people stuck to quick and dirty scripts (and had the sense to use something else when their scripts got too big).