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What I find worse about Python than other languages is the lack of tooling and a relatively small collection of libs - many of which are half way done. In a las

What I find worse about Python than other languages is the lack of tooling and a relatively small collection of libs - many of which are half way done. In a last assignment, we decided Python is at most a hobby language. Python is great for machine learning because most research was conducting using this language, and as such, tooling is available. I would use it at most as an API exposing ML but that's pretty much it.

Daishiman 7y ago
I don't know what parallel reality you live in but there are few languages with as many packages for getting productive things done than Python. In web dev andam data science I have yet to see a language with as many libraries for useful stuff. Now, if what you're looking for is high performance and precise memory management, sure, the language will never give you that. What language has as many easily available libraries? Java, .net and npm come to mind as the only comparable ecosystems.
- trilila 7y ago
  Well, that's what I said, there are plenty of packages for data science. For building APIs and web stuff usually there aren't. Python is nowhere near NodeJS for instance. But whatever suits, if you only know one language, it will seem like the best language out there.
  - Daishiman 7y ago
    No? You have Django and DRF and Flask. DRF is, by far, the best designed framework for building APIs in any programming language I have ever seen, and I've at this game for a long time. JavaScript has 10 times more packages than PyPi, and for the most part they are absolute garbage with no intent on being maintained. Python has substantially fewer packages where the community rallies around them and keeps them as best-in-class. SQLAlchemy, DRF, factoryboy, requests, etc., are all incredible one-stop-shops for the vast majority of use cases. You don't need 15 libraries for doing HTTP requests. You just need one good one that does the job so you never have to think about the problem ever again. Python excels at this class of libraries and by comparison npm has appalling choices.
    - trilila 7y ago
      Oh nice, you have two frameworks. Well, whatever suits your fixed mindset.
      - Daishiman 7y ago
        I'll take a framework that has worked effectively for a decade without significant changes where I can use all my accumulated experience to get things done over the random musings and experimentation of the half-baked JS libraries where you're stuck for hours solving relatively trivial issues that I have never had to think about in DRF because DRF just works and is backed by some of the most experienced people in API architecture in the industry. When you think about and iterate judiciously in a problem domain over a decade instead of trying something different every day to see what sticks, you'll see you can get remarkably far.
      - poooogles 7y ago
        >Oh nice, you have two frameworks. Well, whatever suits your fixed mindset. Let me see, you've got Django, DRF, Flask, Flask-Restful, Flask-Restplus, Flask-API, sanic, pyramid, Cornice, hug, falcon, eve, bottle, tornado, aiohttp, vibora, weppy, starlette... Those are just some that I've picked out of my head.
        trilila 7y ago
        Most of those enumerations are Flask, and the others are basically useless.
        Daishiman 7y ago
        And what exactly are Flask and Django missing to merit more packages doing the same thing? Routing requests and managing HTTP fundamentals is a solved problem. There is literally zero value in adding another framework when the real complexity is in business logic.
        7y ago
  - Greed 7y ago
    This comment is so strangely off the mark I almost wonder if you're basing this off of some secondhand hearsay. Until recently, Python's largest arena of usage was web development and API scaffolding by far. A simple search would have revealed literally thousands of web development focused libraries, most centered around the Django ecosystem [1]. As another commenter mentioned: Django, DRF, Flask But unmentioned... The old titans of Pyramid, Pylons, CherryPy, Bottle, Tornado, wheezy, web2py, and more. A _gigantic_ portion of the community is centered around web development, and the fact that almost all web packages have centralized around Django, DRF, and Flask is a function of dozens upon dozens of popular frameworks merging in a "survival of the fittest" fashion into the best possible union of ideas. You seem to perceive "many packages" that all perform a similar function to be a good thing, but speaking from the perspective of someone who writes 70% Javascript and 30% Python I'll tell you that almost every other sane group of developers considers the highly duplicitous JS ecosystem to be a massive weakness. The NPM ecosystem has an _ocean_ of shallow, highly similar, and one-off frameworks because Javascript developers tend to "divide and conquer" rather than bring good ideas together. Python developers deprecate their packages in favor of better ideas, or just open a pull request to alter the project rather than creating a 99th competing framework in the first place. [1] https://pypi.org/search/?q=&o=&c=Environment+%3A%3A+Web+Environment https://pypi.org/search/?q=&o=&c=Environment+%3A%3A+Web+Envi...
    - trilila 7y ago
      When i worked with python, i remember it having less than 10% of tolling you find even around languages such as php. But you know, religious devs will stick with the only language they know.
ageitgey 7y ago
> In a last assignment, we decided Python is at most a hobby language. I don't know if you are just trolling, but this is the silliest, most detached from reality thing I've read online today. Python was key in building numerous massive public companies like Instagram and Dropbox. It's one of the most popular and widely used programming languages on the planet for everything from APIs to desktop clients to data pipelines. It had a lot of early popularity in the Silicon Valley start-up scene in the early 2000s, even pre-dating the Ruby on Rails web dev trend. The guy who founded the company that runs this very website wrote about the draw of Python 15 years ago [1] at which point it was already widely used in certain niches. This is before any deep learning libraries existed. I remember first playing with Python around 1999 or so. > I would use it at most as an API exposing ML but that's pretty much it. I don't know how old you are or how long you've been in the industry, but the ML thing is a "second act" for Python. Deep learning grew up in a time and place where Python was a good fit which put Python in the right place to benefit. But Python had already lived a long and full life before any of that happened. It's fine if you don't like Python or don't think it is a good fit for a project, but claiming it is a "hobby language" with a "lack of tooling and a relatively small collection of libs" is a good way to get laughed out of the room. It has one of the largest and most diverse libraries. And as far as tooling, Python is one of the most popular languages for implementing tooling. Check out ansible. > There are plenty of packages for data science. For building APIs and web stuff usually there aren't. Python is nowhere near NodeJS for instance. This has got to be a troll, right? Just some of the most popular web frameworks: Django, TurboGears, web2py, Pylons, Zope, Bottle, CherryPy, Flask, Hug, Pyramid, Sanic... Lots of huge websites were originally built with Python like Instagram, Reddit and YouTube. Of course they mature into complex distributed architectures using all kinds of languages, but it's all about the right tool for the job. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
- trilila 7y ago
  It appears tho the right tool for the task at hand, as a codebase grows, is NOT Python. A good starting point for someone fresh of off a university campus, and easily impressionable. An "object oriented" language without even the basics of scope visibility is not object oriented. Half done libs are not libs that one might consider production grade. Debugging tools where you need to dive into execution branches and heck knows what other archaic debugging techniques are not debugging tools. Lacking documentation or poorly written readme fiels are not documentation. This whole Python movement is gaining a bit of traction because it became popular in universities. The realities of real life programming will sway many religious programmers towards more suitable languages. So yeah, fantasising about how Python "is eating the world" is a good dream, but the only thing that Python is eating is dust left behind by far more developed programming languages, surrounded by far more modern ecosystems around them.

Daishiman 7y ago

I don't know what parallel reality you live in but there are few languages with as many packages for getting productive things done than Python. In web dev andam data science I have yet to see a language with as many libraries for useful stuff. Now, if what you're looking for is high performance and precise memory management, sure, the language will never give you that. What language has as many easily available libraries? Java, .net and npm come to mind as the only comparable ecosystems.

trilila 7y ago
Well, that's what I said, there are plenty of packages for data science. For building APIs and web stuff usually there aren't. Python is nowhere near NodeJS for instance. But whatever suits, if you only know one language, it will seem like the best language out there.
- Daishiman 7y ago
  No? You have Django and DRF and Flask. DRF is, by far, the best designed framework for building APIs in any programming language I have ever seen, and I've at this game for a long time. JavaScript has 10 times more packages than PyPi, and for the most part they are absolute garbage with no intent on being maintained. Python has substantially fewer packages where the community rallies around them and keeps them as best-in-class. SQLAlchemy, DRF, factoryboy, requests, etc., are all incredible one-stop-shops for the vast majority of use cases. You don't need 15 libraries for doing HTTP requests. You just need one good one that does the job so you never have to think about the problem ever again. Python excels at this class of libraries and by comparison npm has appalling choices.
  - trilila 7y ago
    Oh nice, you have two frameworks. Well, whatever suits your fixed mindset.
    - Daishiman 7y ago
      I'll take a framework that has worked effectively for a decade without significant changes where I can use all my accumulated experience to get things done over the random musings and experimentation of the half-baked JS libraries where you're stuck for hours solving relatively trivial issues that I have never had to think about in DRF because DRF just works and is backed by some of the most experienced people in API architecture in the industry. When you think about and iterate judiciously in a problem domain over a decade instead of trying something different every day to see what sticks, you'll see you can get remarkably far.
    - poooogles 7y ago
      >Oh nice, you have two frameworks. Well, whatever suits your fixed mindset. Let me see, you've got Django, DRF, Flask, Flask-Restful, Flask-Restplus, Flask-API, sanic, pyramid, Cornice, hug, falcon, eve, bottle, tornado, aiohttp, vibora, weppy, starlette... Those are just some that I've picked out of my head.
      - trilila 7y ago
        Most of those enumerations are Flask, and the others are basically useless.
        Daishiman 7y ago
        And what exactly are Flask and Django missing to merit more packages doing the same thing? Routing requests and managing HTTP fundamentals is a solved problem. There is literally zero value in adding another framework when the real complexity is in business logic.
        7y ago
- Greed 7y ago
  This comment is so strangely off the mark I almost wonder if you're basing this off of some secondhand hearsay. Until recently, Python's largest arena of usage was web development and API scaffolding by far. A simple search would have revealed literally thousands of web development focused libraries, most centered around the Django ecosystem [1]. As another commenter mentioned: Django, DRF, Flask But unmentioned... The old titans of Pyramid, Pylons, CherryPy, Bottle, Tornado, wheezy, web2py, and more. A _gigantic_ portion of the community is centered around web development, and the fact that almost all web packages have centralized around Django, DRF, and Flask is a function of dozens upon dozens of popular frameworks merging in a "survival of the fittest" fashion into the best possible union of ideas. You seem to perceive "many packages" that all perform a similar function to be a good thing, but speaking from the perspective of someone who writes 70% Javascript and 30% Python I'll tell you that almost every other sane group of developers considers the highly duplicitous JS ecosystem to be a massive weakness. The NPM ecosystem has an _ocean_ of shallow, highly similar, and one-off frameworks because Javascript developers tend to "divide and conquer" rather than bring good ideas together. Python developers deprecate their packages in favor of better ideas, or just open a pull request to alter the project rather than creating a 99th competing framework in the first place. [1] https://pypi.org/search/?q=&o=&c=Environment+%3A%3A+Web+Environment https://pypi.org/search/?q=&o=&c=Environment+%3A%3A+Web+Envi...
  - trilila 7y ago
    When i worked with python, i remember it having less than 10% of tolling you find even around languages such as php. But you know, religious devs will stick with the only language they know.

ageitgey 7y ago

> In a last assignment, we decided Python is at most a hobby language. I don't know if you are just trolling, but this is the silliest, most detached from reality thing I've read online today. Python was key in building numerous massive public companies like Instagram and Dropbox. It's one of the most popular and widely used programming languages on the planet for everything from APIs to desktop clients to data pipelines. It had a lot of early popularity in the Silicon Valley start-up scene in the early 2000s, even pre-dating the Ruby on Rails web dev trend. The guy who founded the company that runs this very website wrote about the draw of Python 15 years ago [1] at which point it was already widely used in certain niches. This is before any deep learning libraries existed. I remember first playing with Python around 1999 or so. > I would use it at most as an API exposing ML but that's pretty much it. I don't know how old you are or how long you've been in the industry, but the ML thing is a "second act" for Python. Deep learning grew up in a time and place where Python was a good fit which put Python in the right place to benefit. But Python had already lived a long and full life before any of that happened. It's fine if you don't like Python or don't think it is a good fit for a project, but claiming it is a "hobby language" with a "lack of tooling and a relatively small collection of libs" is a good way to get laughed out of the room. It has one of the largest and most diverse libraries. And as far as tooling, Python is one of the most popular languages for implementing tooling. Check out ansible. > There are plenty of packages for data science. For building APIs and web stuff usually there aren't. Python is nowhere near NodeJS for instance. This has got to be a troll, right? Just some of the most popular web frameworks: Django, TurboGears, web2py, Pylons, Zope, Bottle, CherryPy, Flask, Hug, Pyramid, Sanic... Lots of huge websites were originally built with Python like Instagram, Reddit and YouTube. Of course they mature into complex distributed architectures using all kinds of languages, but it's all about the right tool for the job. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

trilila 7y ago
It appears tho the right tool for the task at hand, as a codebase grows, is NOT Python. A good starting point for someone fresh of off a university campus, and easily impressionable. An "object oriented" language without even the basics of scope visibility is not object oriented. Half done libs are not libs that one might consider production grade. Debugging tools where you need to dive into execution branches and heck knows what other archaic debugging techniques are not debugging tools. Lacking documentation or poorly written readme fiels are not documentation. This whole Python movement is gaining a bit of traction because it became popular in universities. The realities of real life programming will sway many religious programmers towards more suitable languages. So yeah, fantasising about how Python "is eating the world" is a good dream, but the only thing that Python is eating is dust left behind by far more developed programming languages, surrounded by far more modern ecosystems around them.