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Agreed. I really don't understand all these buckets filth being poured on Python in this thread. It's a first language I worked with in my life that just click

Agreed. I really don't understand all these buckets filth being poured on Python in this thread. It's a first language I worked with in my life that just clicked with my brain and doesn't just drain me. I would take a Python job over a Java/C/C++/Go/Rust any day. There's some languages that could pull me away from Python (Nim, Crystal) but they're nowhere popular enough to move wholesale to them.

skywhopper 7y ago
And some people feel the opposite. I’m glad Python works for you. I had the same click-with-my-brain feeling with Ruby, whereas I find working with Python to be draining and demoralizing.
Ensorceled 7y ago
I've worked in so many languages and environments in my career and Django/python/virtualenv has to be one of the least painful. I tried Rails which is very similar but feels "inside out", a good friend of mine loves Rails and hates Django and has the exact same feeling about Django. That's kind of my point, you may like other environments better, such as React/Node/NPM but that doesn't mean Python is a horror show. I'm quite enjoying Go though.
- nighthawk648 7y ago
  How stable is python to run a full trading / quantitative algorithm on? I feel there are benefits for every language. I am just curious if super stable and scalable conditions can be met on python.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    >How stable is python to run a full trading / quantitative algorithm on? JP Morgan operates a ~30 million LOC Python platform for trading and analytics. (related talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk) Yes, there are very, very large working python codebases in fields out there that demand correctness. I'm honestly getting tired of the static typing circlejerk that has entered the industry.
    - stevesimmons 7y ago
      That's my talk! Thank you for posting that :) Python has been my main programming language since 2000, fwiw.
    - nighthawk648 7y ago
      Btw, jpmorgan dev team is rediculous because support is so massive the only way new projects get done is by hiring massive amounts of people / consultant firms and then lay offs. Not saying there is a problem, I’m sure some people like to have their throat taken out when the trade doesn’t execute at markdown price. Anyways I don’t have a problem with that type of pressured enviorment. I’m moreso pointing out people’s need for comfort of solution rather then sustainability. Getting started is more difficult so many are turned away. Also some of the computation python can do is very powerful and I would trust it if I was no risk besides myself going balls deep.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    What do you mean by "stable"? FORTRAN will give you super scalable conditions. I don't think you really meant that either... do you have a GPU cluster at work?
    - nighthawk648 7y ago
      Sorry couldn’t respond due to fault segmentation.
    - TheRealKing 7y ago
      Fortran (since 1990)
inoop 7y ago
> I would take a Python job over a Java/C/C++/Go/Rust any day it's funny, I feel the exact opposite. I work on a team that maintains a digital catalog, and a lot of what we write is about taking in asset- and metadata files, asynchronously processing them, and then publishing that to a denormalized read-optimized data store. We often joke that we mostly take data from 'over here' and put it 'over there'. All our stuff is in Java, and honestly, if you use Lombok to squeeze out the boilerplate, and a decent dependency injection framework like Guice or Dagger, modern Java really isn't so bad. Streams are clunky but they get the job done. We use Jackson a lot to serialize/deserialize Java pojos to JSON and XML, which is pretty seamless for us so far. The Optional class is again clunky, but it works well enough. The thing for us though is that the problems we spend most time solving are just not really related to the language we write it in. The hard problems are much more around things like operations (cd/ci, metrics, alarms, canaries), performance (latency, load, etc.) and just the nuts and bolts of the business logic (what type should this new field be? what values can it take? how do we plumb this through to downstream system X owned by team Y? etc.) I honestly wouldn't want to have to write this stuff in Python for a simple reason: I don't think I could live without static typing, which is a fantastic tool when you need to manage a large code base written by multiple people over multiple years. I can make a change in some package, do a dry-run compile of every system that uses it, and then see what needs updating. It gives me certain guarantees about data integrity right at compile time, which is super helpful when you're doing data conversion. But hey, different jobs, different tools. Glad you found something you're happy with.
- koolba 7y ago
  > I honestly wouldn't want to have to write this stuff in Python for a simple reason: I don't think I could live without static typing, which is a fantastic tool when you need to manage a large code base written by multiple people over multiple years. I can make a change in some package, do a dry-run compile of every system that uses it, and then see what needs updating. It gives me certain guarantees about data integrity right at compile time, which is super helpful when you're doing data conversion. Programming in the large without type safety is a fool’s errand. > But hey, different jobs, different tools. Exactly. There’s a reason your kitchen drawer isn’t full of just sporks.
aswanson 7y ago
Python is great; I picked it up back in the early 2.xx days. My main problem with it is the string handling/conversion code is brittle and the breakage of backward compatibility. But it's overall a great language.
uncletaco 7y ago
Python is the first language that clicked with my brain as well and in college I often used it to prototype homework algorithms before translating them into the language I needed to actually submit my work in. I have nothing but love for python as a language. At the same time even when I used it heavily I never saw it as anything more than a scripting language to sit in front of some tool that was written in a language I couldn't be fucked to learn at that moment (numpy and scipy were used heavily throughout my college career). If I'm being honest I don't understand how anyone could get as worked up about a language as the people in this thread have. At the end of the day most of us are still writing unportable imperative code that runs like shit. Maybe blaming language is how we cope with our own failure as engineers.
- klibertp 7y ago
  > At the end of the day most of us are still writing unportable imperative code that runs like shit. Maybe blaming language is how we cope with our own failure as engineers. Sounds just about right ;)
weberc2 7y ago
> I would take a Python job over a Java/C/C++/Go/Rust any day. Why do you group those languages like they’re similar but different from nim and crystal? They’re wildly different in terms of their target domain, runtime models, etc. Go and Java are general purpose application languages and the others are more suited for systems or performance critical applications.

skywhopper 7y ago

And some people feel the opposite. I’m glad Python works for you. I had the same click-with-my-brain feeling with Ruby, whereas I find working with Python to be draining and demoralizing.

Ensorceled 7y ago

I've worked in so many languages and environments in my career and Django/python/virtualenv has to be one of the least painful. I tried Rails which is very similar but feels "inside out", a good friend of mine loves Rails and hates Django and has the exact same feeling about Django. That's kind of my point, you may like other environments better, such as React/Node/NPM but that doesn't mean Python is a horror show. I'm quite enjoying Go though.

nighthawk648 7y ago
How stable is python to run a full trading / quantitative algorithm on? I feel there are benefits for every language. I am just curious if super stable and scalable conditions can be met on python.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >How stable is python to run a full trading / quantitative algorithm on? JP Morgan operates a ~30 million LOC Python platform for trading and analytics. (related talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk) Yes, there are very, very large working python codebases in fields out there that demand correctness. I'm honestly getting tired of the static typing circlejerk that has entered the industry.
  - stevesimmons 7y ago
    That's my talk! Thank you for posting that :) Python has been my main programming language since 2000, fwiw.
  - nighthawk648 7y ago
    Btw, jpmorgan dev team is rediculous because support is so massive the only way new projects get done is by hiring massive amounts of people / consultant firms and then lay offs. Not saying there is a problem, I’m sure some people like to have their throat taken out when the trade doesn’t execute at markdown price. Anyways I don’t have a problem with that type of pressured enviorment. I’m moreso pointing out people’s need for comfort of solution rather then sustainability. Getting started is more difficult so many are turned away. Also some of the computation python can do is very powerful and I would trust it if I was no risk besides myself going balls deep.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  What do you mean by "stable"? FORTRAN will give you super scalable conditions. I don't think you really meant that either... do you have a GPU cluster at work?
  - nighthawk648 7y ago
    Sorry couldn’t respond due to fault segmentation.
  - TheRealKing 7y ago
    Fortran (since 1990)

inoop 7y ago

> I would take a Python job over a Java/C/C++/Go/Rust any day it's funny, I feel the exact opposite. I work on a team that maintains a digital catalog, and a lot of what we write is about taking in asset- and metadata files, asynchronously processing them, and then publishing that to a denormalized read-optimized data store. We often joke that we mostly take data from 'over here' and put it 'over there'. All our stuff is in Java, and honestly, if you use Lombok to squeeze out the boilerplate, and a decent dependency injection framework like Guice or Dagger, modern Java really isn't so bad. Streams are clunky but they get the job done. We use Jackson a lot to serialize/deserialize Java pojos to JSON and XML, which is pretty seamless for us so far. The Optional class is again clunky, but it works well enough. The thing for us though is that the problems we spend most time solving are just not really related to the language we write it in. The hard problems are much more around things like operations (cd/ci, metrics, alarms, canaries), performance (latency, load, etc.) and just the nuts and bolts of the business logic (what type should this new field be? what values can it take? how do we plumb this through to downstream system X owned by team Y? etc.) I honestly wouldn't want to have to write this stuff in Python for a simple reason: I don't think I could live without static typing, which is a fantastic tool when you need to manage a large code base written by multiple people over multiple years. I can make a change in some package, do a dry-run compile of every system that uses it, and then see what needs updating. It gives me certain guarantees about data integrity right at compile time, which is super helpful when you're doing data conversion. But hey, different jobs, different tools. Glad you found something you're happy with.

koolba 7y ago
> I honestly wouldn't want to have to write this stuff in Python for a simple reason: I don't think I could live without static typing, which is a fantastic tool when you need to manage a large code base written by multiple people over multiple years. I can make a change in some package, do a dry-run compile of every system that uses it, and then see what needs updating. It gives me certain guarantees about data integrity right at compile time, which is super helpful when you're doing data conversion. Programming in the large without type safety is a fool’s errand. > But hey, different jobs, different tools. Exactly. There’s a reason your kitchen drawer isn’t full of just sporks.

aswanson 7y ago

Python is great; I picked it up back in the early 2.xx days. My main problem with it is the string handling/conversion code is brittle and the breakage of backward compatibility. But it's overall a great language.

uncletaco 7y ago

Python is the first language that clicked with my brain as well and in college I often used it to prototype homework algorithms before translating them into the language I needed to actually submit my work in. I have nothing but love for python as a language. At the same time even when I used it heavily I never saw it as anything more than a scripting language to sit in front of some tool that was written in a language I couldn't be fucked to learn at that moment (numpy and scipy were used heavily throughout my college career). If I'm being honest I don't understand how anyone could get as worked up about a language as the people in this thread have. At the end of the day most of us are still writing unportable imperative code that runs like shit. Maybe blaming language is how we cope with our own failure as engineers.

klibertp 7y ago
> At the end of the day most of us are still writing unportable imperative code that runs like shit. Maybe blaming language is how we cope with our own failure as engineers. Sounds just about right ;)

weberc2 7y ago

> I would take a Python job over a Java/C/C++/Go/Rust any day. Why do you group those languages like they’re similar but different from nim and crystal? They’re wildly different in terms of their target domain, runtime models, etc. Go and Java are general purpose application languages and the others are more suited for systems or performance critical applications.