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As someone who appreciated C and C-style languages I hated on python for a long time. I disliked python because of syntactical annoyances,mistakes I would notm

As someone who appreciated C and C-style languages I hated on python for a long time. I disliked python because of syntactical annoyances,mistakes I would notmally iron out at compile time now happen at run time and version fragmentation with no backward compatibility at times. On that last point,new java versions for example would deprecate features over time allowing the programmer the option of enabling these features. I still think the simple things like mixing tabs and spaces shouldn't have caused a hard failure,warnings or ability to override the deprecation would have been nice. Not only that,I hated how I would ship a python program having tested it in one python version and five years from now the default python version on linux distros (or default installer for windows) would install an incompatible version,I hated how users of my program would have to figure out the correct version. But I no longer hate python mostly as a result of having seen how easily it has helped me solve different types problems that are otherwise difficult or time consuming to solve. At the end of the day,it gets the job done well,is easy to learn,harder to screw up in and has saved me a ton of time.

oblib 8y ago
"I disliked python because of syntactical annoyances,mistakes" That's how I felt coming from perl to python, but I did learn to like it after working with it a bit.
anotherevan 8y ago
I was also highly dubious of the whole indentation thing until I started using coffeescript.
pbourke 8y ago
This sounds similar to my journey with Python. For years, I used it as a go to for programs that were bigger than a bash script but smaller than an application or service. I mostly wrote single .py files with maybe the odd module and avoided setuptools and friends. In the last year, I’ve been working on a larger library in Python, which has meant getting into the packaging and deployment tool chain and structuring a project with dozens of files, tests, etc. My background has been in mainline languages such as Java and C#, with excursions into Clojure, F#, etc. We adopted the new Python type annotations and they seem to increase the visual clutter of the language without delivering many benefits in terms of confidence or ease of development/code completion. Our library is aimed at data science, so I’m sure not many users will actually bother setting up the tools to do type checking. I do still appreciate Python, but I wonder whether my issues are due to our approach, my current level of familiarity with Python and the ecosystem or the fact that we’re working in the data science world which is new to me as well.

oblib 8y ago

"I disliked python because of syntactical annoyances,mistakes" That's how I felt coming from perl to python, but I did learn to like it after working with it a bit.

anotherevan 8y ago

I was also highly dubious of the whole indentation thing until I started using coffeescript.

pbourke 8y ago

This sounds similar to my journey with Python. For years, I used it as a go to for programs that were bigger than a bash script but smaller than an application or service. I mostly wrote single .py files with maybe the odd module and avoided setuptools and friends. In the last year, I’ve been working on a larger library in Python, which has meant getting into the packaging and deployment tool chain and structuring a project with dozens of files, tests, etc. My background has been in mainline languages such as Java and C#, with excursions into Clojure, F#, etc. We adopted the new Python type annotations and they seem to increase the visual clutter of the language without delivering many benefits in terms of confidence or ease of development/code completion. Our library is aimed at data science, so I’m sure not many users will actually bother setting up the tools to do type checking. I do still appreciate Python, but I wonder whether my issues are due to our approach, my current level of familiarity with Python and the ecosystem or the fact that we’re working in the data science world which is new to me as well.