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I tend to agree with the author (although not with a few of his specific reasons) that Python is terrible. Everywhere I've ever been that used Python they've cl
by SamWhited 8y ago
I tend to agree with the author (although not with a few of his specific reasons) that Python is terrible. Everywhere I've ever been that used Python they've claimed it was to make development faster, but mostly we just fought with bugs that cropped up around tests that were too aggressively mocked and weren't testing things, or stuff that somehow was in the wrong scope because someones editor was using the wrong type of whitespace, etc. And don't get me started how on every single code review I had to force people to write unit tests that wouldn't have to exist if there was a static type system to effectively be those tests for us.
That being said, if your alternative is C or PHP suck it up and stick with Python. There is no situation in which PHP is the appropriate tool for the job, and as simple as C is and as much as I love it you're much more likely to introduce weird bugs and create broken software if you're using C. Python at least has some basic memory safety, even if its tooling and versioning is all horribly broken. As a user of software (and also a devloper): please stop writing things in C and related languages, if I keep seeing segfaults in popular products with huge QA teams behind them, I'm going to go insane.
- capdeck 8y agoWanted to second that the author mentions C as being "simpler" alternative -- doesn't make much sense as it is quite a "footgun" it itself. I'd much rather search for missing indents in Python than debug segfaults in C. Also, package managers are almost not a thing in C land. Did OP try Rust -- that may check quite a few of his boxes...
- tabtab 8y agoRe: There is no situation in which PHP is the appropriate tool for the job... While clunky as a language, PHP's "environment" is better if you are doing web apps. Easier to install, including a test setup, more web-oriented libraries and functions, and a built-in HTML templating language for "view" pages (per MVC). If your stack is designed right, you'll be spending most your time plugging in parameters to API's such that the language itself won't make a whole lot of difference. You should be mostly gluing libraries, not writing an OS from scratch. If I were doing the second, then Python would be the better choice.
- SamWhited 8y agoIf you're doing web dev it just makes it easier to write crap. I am also utterly sick of pentesting every garbage website written in PHP and finding dozens of easily avoidable bugs that always boil down to PHP being terrible at what it does. It may be easy to use, but that's no excuse to use it and write bad software.
- tabtab 8y agoThey probably copy and pasted decade+ old code floating around that was written before Php wised up about security.