5 ms·

Wow. (a) I don't know Python as well as I thought I did. (b) I suddenly never want to use it again. All these edge cases! All these behaviors, which I'm sure

Wow. (a) I don't know Python as well as I thought I did. (b) I suddenly never want to use it again. All these edge cases! All these behaviors, which I'm sure were added with the noble intention of increasing developer convenience, but which I'm equally sure have cost a larger amount of developer sanity!

tziki 6y ago
If you don't want to use a language because in theoretical scenarios it's possible construct unintuitive operations with it, then what language are you left with?
- afandian 6y ago
  LISP?
- tromp 6y ago
  I was going to bring up Haskell as a language with clear semantics, but even that has its quirks, like Prelude> [1, 3 .. 10] :: [Float] [1.0,3.0,5.0,7.0,9.0,11.0] In Haskell, this is syntactic sugar for the function enumFromThenTo (in typeclass Enum), which in my view should not have a special case implementation for Float.
tyre 6y ago
I've been writing python for about a year and change now (~7 years of engineering generally) and I never want to use it again. It feels to me like javascript in that it's "popular" because people already use/know it. So that huge existing codebase is the equivalent to the web; if you want to build on it, you're stuck with this. But my lord. Whitespace sensitivity is a terrible choice and there are piles of kludges trying to work around that. It means no multi-line lambdas so you end up with these unreadable list comprehensions `[ sub_item.value for sub_item in item.sub_items in items if item.is_the_best ]`. Lines copied into the console care about indentation which is definitely not a fun DX. Not to mention these random global functions everywhere. Whew. Mistakes were made.
- andybak 6y ago
  > Whitespace sensitivity is a terrible choice It's my favourite feature of Python and I actively seek out other languages that make this terrible choice. I regularly use Python and a couple of curly brace languages and coming back to Python always feels like a breath of fresh air.
  - aib 6y ago
    > > Whitespace sensitivity is a terrible choice > It's my favourite feature of Python It's like the speed bump: It's for people who can't follow simple rules. It inconveniences you, but is rationalized with that it ultimately makes the world a little safer for everyone, including you. Me, I unindent temporary code like debug-print statements and literals overriding actual data. This makes it impossible to commit by accident. But my argument against whitespace sensitivity would be that bad and unreadable code is bad and unreadable regardless of its whitespace. In fact, force-formatting it just hides the evidence.
  - pansa2 6y ago
    > Python always feels like a breath of fresh air. That’s a good way to put it. Significant indentation makes the syntax so much more lightweight. This image [0] is supposed to be a joke, but to me it clearly demonstrates how braces and semicolons are both ugly and redundant. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2wrxyt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2wrxyt/
- pansa2 6y ago
  > It means no multi-line lambdas so you end up with these unreadable list comprehensions `[ sub_item.value for sub_item in item.sub_items in items if item.is_the_best ]` How would you rather write that code? Is it lack of multi-line lambdas that stops you from writing it as you would like?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ulucs 6y ago

tziki 6y ago

If you don't want to use a language because in theoretical scenarios it's possible construct unintuitive operations with it, then what language are you left with?

afandian 6y ago
LISP?
tromp 6y ago
I was going to bring up Haskell as a language with clear semantics, but even that has its quirks, like Prelude> [1, 3 .. 10] :: [Float] [1.0,3.0,5.0,7.0,9.0,11.0] In Haskell, this is syntactic sugar for the function enumFromThenTo (in typeclass Enum), which in my view should not have a special case implementation for Float.

tyre 6y ago

I've been writing python for about a year and change now (~7 years of engineering generally) and I never want to use it again. It feels to me like javascript in that it's "popular" because people already use/know it. So that huge existing codebase is the equivalent to the web; if you want to build on it, you're stuck with this. But my lord. Whitespace sensitivity is a terrible choice and there are piles of kludges trying to work around that. It means no multi-line lambdas so you end up with these unreadable list comprehensions `[ sub_item.value for sub_item in item.sub_items in items if item.is_the_best ]`. Lines copied into the console care about indentation which is definitely not a fun DX. Not to mention these random global functions everywhere. Whew. Mistakes were made.

andybak 6y ago
> Whitespace sensitivity is a terrible choice It's my favourite feature of Python and I actively seek out other languages that make this terrible choice. I regularly use Python and a couple of curly brace languages and coming back to Python always feels like a breath of fresh air.
- aib 6y ago
  > > Whitespace sensitivity is a terrible choice > It's my favourite feature of Python It's like the speed bump: It's for people who can't follow simple rules. It inconveniences you, but is rationalized with that it ultimately makes the world a little safer for everyone, including you. Me, I unindent temporary code like debug-print statements and literals overriding actual data. This makes it impossible to commit by accident. But my argument against whitespace sensitivity would be that bad and unreadable code is bad and unreadable regardless of its whitespace. In fact, force-formatting it just hides the evidence.
- pansa2 6y ago
  > Python always feels like a breath of fresh air. That’s a good way to put it. Significant indentation makes the syntax so much more lightweight. This image [0] is supposed to be a joke, but to me it clearly demonstrates how braces and semicolons are both ugly and redundant. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2wrxyt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2wrxyt/
pansa2 6y ago
> It means no multi-line lambdas so you end up with these unreadable list comprehensions `[ sub_item.value for sub_item in item.sub_items in items if item.is_the_best ]` How would you rather write that code? Is it lack of multi-line lambdas that stops you from writing it as you would like?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ulucs 6y ago