6 ms·

A Python Substitute? I Tried the Best Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

32 points by yakkomajuri 6y ago

yakkomajuri 6y ago
Bypass the paywall with this link: https://medium.com/better-programming/a-python-substitute-i-tried-out-the-best-programming-language-youve-never-heard-of-9e29cd1893c0?source=friends_link&sk=61b12cfd6456f992013ba61e710efc72 https://medium.com/better-programming/a-python-substitute-i-...
- jraph 6y ago
  Or just disable Javascript. On Medium, you get a great experience doing this, because it disables what I call the "progressive degradation" strategy set up on Medium. This allows the "graceful enhancement" strategy to kick in. See how images and text render perfectly without JS. I've already said this here, but progressive degradation is a great strategy going like this: you start with a sane and nice baseline, and then add crap to that for supported browsers and configurations. You can be thankful to Medium for adopting this technique, because if everybody did that, you'd get a perfect Web by just blocking Javascript on anything that is supposed to be a freaking document. Please lobby for this. The team behind Medium might even be secretly doing this on purpose but don't tell their boss.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    I use the same trick, the problem is in this case the code examples don't work, you need to unblock JS for a moment.
melling 6y ago
Looks like Nim uses let and var to declare immutable and mutable variables. I prefer this to var and val in Scala That’s also how Swift does it too. Throw in type inference and statically typed languages look much nicer. Swift uses C style braces, while Nim seems to use white space like Python.
- yakkomajuri 6y ago
  Didn't know about Swift using both, will add that.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  I wish languages used let to mean a lazily evaluated named expression. Then you can define all your terms that can depend on other lets and only the ones needed in the executed code path get executed once.
arthtyagi 6y ago
nah man, i've tried Nim. it's meh.
- yakkomajuri 6y ago
  Interesting. Would be cool to hear your thoughts: what was meh about it? Lack of tooling maybe?
  - arthtyagi 6y ago
    yes exactly plus there are some things not about the language itself but the whole foundation backing it up, it lacks marketing and advocacy. It looks appealing but given that lack of marketing and popularity, it needs to have A LOT OF advantages to still be considered a contender in mainstream production environments which it fails to achieve since it doesn't really have a whole lot of advantages to it ( I'm just saying there aren't as many to back up for the flaws of it's foundation ). Hence, I don't dislike Nim at all but I don't find it good either, I find it alright.
    - yakkomajuri 6y ago
      Yeah, I completely get that. Was talking to a core dev today and he mentioned the limited tooling/ecosystem. It doesn't help when you're a competitor of either very well-established languages or ones that are backed by big corporations (e.g. Go)
    - LyndsySimon 6y ago
      You have valid points, but I’d argue that Python looked like that for much of its life. It didn’t really start to see widespread adoption until Django hit the scene - from memory, 2012-2014 was when it started to go from “esoteric scripting language” to “alternative to Ruby” and finally “default for new web backends”. I’m very interested in Nim and try to keep up with news, but I just don’t have time for yet another language and community. That’s unfortunate because I see a lot of promise in it, and I think it would be a joy to work with every day. I’m just quietly waiting, hoping for Nim’s Django.
  - 6y ago
yomly 6y ago
This is the actual blog post title but it is clickbait. Also this is HN - people have heard of Nim. I don't want to have to click through to know what the language comparison is.
- arthtyagi 6y ago
  I was actually curious at first and then I was like ah shit here we go again "NiM : the python killer", it for real is not by any means gonna be able to replace python given the stark difference in usage atm in addition to Nim's inadequete marketing and advocacy present right now. Just doesn't add up.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    I feel the opposite: Nim is overmarketed here on HN, just like D. It's marketed as a modern systems programming language, but I don't see any benchmark comparision with C/C++/Rust on language benchmark shootout. As for me I selected Julia from the language benchmark shootout as my to go programming language, and I'm not looking back (Rust/C++ are a bit too level for my needs, but I still need performance).
    - dom96 6y ago
      > I don't see any benchmark comparision with C/C++/Rust on language benchmark shootout. Funnily enough this is because the author of that benchmark outright refuses to include new languages such as Nim.
      - xiphias2 6y ago
        That's so sad :( I learned a lot from the benchmarks themselves. Somebody could just fork it if it's not well maintained, but I know that it's extra work.
nepeckman 6y ago
Nim is my "scripting" language of choice for any quick tools I write. Just today I needed to do some data exploration on a 1 million line CSV file. No formal data analysis, just needed to understand the shape of the data and answer a few questions. Writing the script was easy thanks to Nim's nice syntax and big standard library. My most complex query finished in a minute, most of my queries took less than 20 seconds to complete. This is all unoptimized code using the garbage collector and idiomatic language features. Nim isnt without its faults, but it is a seriously underrated language.
- timothycrosley 6y ago
  The problem with examples like this is that simple FileIO operations are optimized across all languages. It would likely have similar speed in very naive unoptimized Python. Here is an example: Given `create_csv.py`: with open("output.csv", "w") as csv_file: for i in range(1_000_001): csv_file.write(",".join([str(i)] * 100)) # creating 100 columns per entry out of a million csv_file.write("\n") and `search_csv.py`: import sys for row in open("output.csv"): if "1000000" in row.split(","): print(row) break else: sys.exit("row 1 million not found!") With the first script creating a 1 million line csv with each row containing 100 columns, and the second one being a worse case search (has to make it all the way to last row, has to search every column). The performance is better than what you mentioned on commodity hardware, very unoptimized Python code, and default Python3 installation: time python3 create_csv.py real 0m3.267s user 0m2.589s sys 0m0.608s time python3 search_csv.py 1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000 real 0m6.132s user 0m5.954s sys 0m0.162s
mreome 6y ago
The question of it being "clickbait" aside, I find the title a bit odd. I can’t see any language that "You've Never Heard Of" as being a possible Python substitute. In my mind, one of the single largest reasons for using Python is how ubiquitous it is and how large the community is. Virtually any question or problem I run into with Python's core libraries or language features is answered in detail by the first Google result. It's getting rare to not find a reasonably well documented Python binding for any given library, and many projects have official Python bindings. It's almost trivial to find an example of how to do virtually anything in Python. Any language could be argued as an alternative to Python, but very few can be a substitute for it given the scale of investment and mind-share Python has.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  This. Python is a genuine great choice for so many disciplines as well. If I have a ML project, then need to make a web app around it, and want to manage my environment, Python is a genuinely great language for _all_ of those needs all at the same time. Great as they may be in their own domains, you can’t say that about Julia, Nim, Matlab etc. Just JavaScript transpiring seem A bit lacking atm, then it is complete...
  - ChrisRackauckas 6y ago
    What's wrong with Julia here? Its webservers and web app packages are pretty amazing. I just moved everything from a mixture of Ruby and Python over to various forms of it and have had far less issues. I think the testing and the "one language stack" culture of Julia leads to more robust software and you can fairly clearly see it in the general-purpose areas.
    - rich_sasha 6y ago
      Nothing _wrong_ with Julia, and likely my knowledge of it is outdated. But my point is, Python ranks, in popularity, quality and appropriateness, as a top choice for so many categories of SE. It’s not like a, say, good scientific programming language with an also surprisingly good web front end. Not sure you would say that about Julia, for lack of popularity if nothing else.

32 points by yakkomajuri 6y ago

Bypass the paywall with this link: https://medium.com/better-programming/a-python-substitute-i-tried-out-the-best-programming-language-youve-never-heard-of-9e29cd1893c0?source=friends_link&sk=61b12cfd6456f992013ba61e710efc72 https://medium.com/better-programming/a-python-substitute-i-...

jraph 6y ago
Or just disable Javascript. On Medium, you get a great experience doing this, because it disables what I call the "progressive degradation" strategy set up on Medium. This allows the "graceful enhancement" strategy to kick in. See how images and text render perfectly without JS. I've already said this here, but progressive degradation is a great strategy going like this: you start with a sane and nice baseline, and then add crap to that for supported browsers and configurations. You can be thankful to Medium for adopting this technique, because if everybody did that, you'd get a perfect Web by just blocking Javascript on anything that is supposed to be a freaking document. Please lobby for this. The team behind Medium might even be secretly doing this on purpose but don't tell their boss.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  I use the same trick, the problem is in this case the code examples don't work, you need to unblock JS for a moment.

melling 6y ago

Looks like Nim uses let and var to declare immutable and mutable variables. I prefer this to var and val in Scala That’s also how Swift does it too. Throw in type inference and statically typed languages look much nicer. Swift uses C style braces, while Nim seems to use white space like Python.

yakkomajuri 6y ago
Didn't know about Swift using both, will add that.
karmakaze 6y ago
I wish languages used let to mean a lazily evaluated named expression. Then you can define all your terms that can depend on other lets and only the ones needed in the executed code path get executed once.

arthtyagi 6y ago

nah man, i've tried Nim. it's meh.

yakkomajuri 6y ago
Interesting. Would be cool to hear your thoughts: what was meh about it? Lack of tooling maybe?
- arthtyagi 6y ago
  yes exactly plus there are some things not about the language itself but the whole foundation backing it up, it lacks marketing and advocacy. It looks appealing but given that lack of marketing and popularity, it needs to have A LOT OF advantages to still be considered a contender in mainstream production environments which it fails to achieve since it doesn't really have a whole lot of advantages to it ( I'm just saying there aren't as many to back up for the flaws of it's foundation ). Hence, I don't dislike Nim at all but I don't find it good either, I find it alright.
  - yakkomajuri 6y ago
    Yeah, I completely get that. Was talking to a core dev today and he mentioned the limited tooling/ecosystem. It doesn't help when you're a competitor of either very well-established languages or ones that are backed by big corporations (e.g. Go)
  - LyndsySimon 6y ago
    You have valid points, but I’d argue that Python looked like that for much of its life. It didn’t really start to see widespread adoption until Django hit the scene - from memory, 2012-2014 was when it started to go from “esoteric scripting language” to “alternative to Ruby” and finally “default for new web backends”. I’m very interested in Nim and try to keep up with news, but I just don’t have time for yet another language and community. That’s unfortunate because I see a lot of promise in it, and I think it would be a joy to work with every day. I’m just quietly waiting, hoping for Nim’s Django.
- 6y ago

yomly 6y ago

This is the actual blog post title but it is clickbait. Also this is HN - people have heard of Nim. I don't want to have to click through to know what the language comparison is.

arthtyagi 6y ago
I was actually curious at first and then I was like ah shit here we go again "NiM : the python killer", it for real is not by any means gonna be able to replace python given the stark difference in usage atm in addition to Nim's inadequete marketing and advocacy present right now. Just doesn't add up.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  I feel the opposite: Nim is overmarketed here on HN, just like D. It's marketed as a modern systems programming language, but I don't see any benchmark comparision with C/C++/Rust on language benchmark shootout. As for me I selected Julia from the language benchmark shootout as my to go programming language, and I'm not looking back (Rust/C++ are a bit too level for my needs, but I still need performance).
  - dom96 6y ago
    > I don't see any benchmark comparision with C/C++/Rust on language benchmark shootout. Funnily enough this is because the author of that benchmark outright refuses to include new languages such as Nim.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      That's so sad :( I learned a lot from the benchmarks themselves. Somebody could just fork it if it's not well maintained, but I know that it's extra work.

nepeckman 6y ago

Nim is my "scripting" language of choice for any quick tools I write. Just today I needed to do some data exploration on a 1 million line CSV file. No formal data analysis, just needed to understand the shape of the data and answer a few questions. Writing the script was easy thanks to Nim's nice syntax and big standard library. My most complex query finished in a minute, most of my queries took less than 20 seconds to complete. This is all unoptimized code using the garbage collector and idiomatic language features. Nim isnt without its faults, but it is a seriously underrated language.

timothycrosley 6y ago
The problem with examples like this is that simple FileIO operations are optimized across all languages. It would likely have similar speed in very naive unoptimized Python. Here is an example: Given `create_csv.py`: with open("output.csv", "w") as csv_file: for i in range(1_000_001): csv_file.write(",".join([str(i)] * 100)) # creating 100 columns per entry out of a million csv_file.write("\n") and `search_csv.py`: import sys for row in open("output.csv"): if "1000000" in row.split(","): print(row) break else: sys.exit("row 1 million not found!") With the first script creating a 1 million line csv with each row containing 100 columns, and the second one being a worse case search (has to make it all the way to last row, has to search every column). The performance is better than what you mentioned on commodity hardware, very unoptimized Python code, and default Python3 installation: time python3 create_csv.py real 0m3.267s user 0m2.589s sys 0m0.608s time python3 search_csv.py 1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000,1000000 real 0m6.132s user 0m5.954s sys 0m0.162s

mreome 6y ago

The question of it being "clickbait" aside, I find the title a bit odd. I can’t see any language that "You've Never Heard Of" as being a possible Python substitute. In my mind, one of the single largest reasons for using Python is how ubiquitous it is and how large the community is. Virtually any question or problem I run into with Python's core libraries or language features is answered in detail by the first Google result. It's getting rare to not find a reasonably well documented Python binding for any given library, and many projects have official Python bindings. It's almost trivial to find an example of how to do virtually anything in Python. Any language could be argued as an alternative to Python, but very few can be a substitute for it given the scale of investment and mind-share Python has.

rich_sasha 6y ago
This. Python is a genuine great choice for so many disciplines as well. If I have a ML project, then need to make a web app around it, and want to manage my environment, Python is a genuinely great language for _all_ of those needs all at the same time. Great as they may be in their own domains, you can’t say that about Julia, Nim, Matlab etc. Just JavaScript transpiring seem A bit lacking atm, then it is complete...
- ChrisRackauckas 6y ago
  What's wrong with Julia here? Its webservers and web app packages are pretty amazing. I just moved everything from a mixture of Ruby and Python over to various forms of it and have had far less issues. I think the testing and the "one language stack" culture of Julia leads to more robust software and you can fairly clearly see it in the general-purpose areas.
  - rich_sasha 6y ago
    Nothing _wrong_ with Julia, and likely my knowledge of it is outdated. But my point is, Python ranks, in popularity, quality and appropriateness, as a top choice for so many categories of SE. It’s not like a, say, good scientific programming language with an also surprisingly good web front end. Not sure you would say that about Julia, for lack of popularity if nothing else.