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This post isn't a list of reasons why Python is bad. It's a list of design choices in Python the author disagrees with. A "bad" language isn't a language that
by ivraatiems 5y ago
This post isn't a list of reasons why Python is bad. It's a list of design choices in Python the author disagrees with.
A "bad" language isn't a language that uses typing discipline X or keyword convention Y or whatever that you don't like. A language is bad when it is inconsistent, buggily implemented, hard to use correctly, etc.
JavaScript and PHP (the latter much less so recently) are good examples of widely used languages that are, from a more neutral design standpoint, arguably quite bad. Python does things I wouldn't choose to do if it were up to me, and I don't regularly use it, but I don't think it's "bad" in the same way.
- cosmotic 5y agoDesign choices have consequences. If those consequences are consistent, and consistently bad, I think it's a fair point to call them out as mistakes or bad choices.
- ivraatiems 5y agoI suppose I'd agree with that, but then we have to start talking about what we mean by "bad" -- bad for whom; bad to do what with? I once watched the action movie Pacific Rim with a friend who told me she didn't like it because it didn't have enough story and character development. She's right that it doesn't have much of that, but it also was never trying to. It may not have been the movie for her, but that isn't the same as being a bad - poorly executed - movie. Transformers, on the other hand, is bad at achieving even what it sets out to achieve. Much easier to call that bad, in my view.
- cosmotic 5y agoIf it's bad by one metric for one person but not-good for all other people in all other metrics, then overall I think it's fair to call it bad. You don't need to rigorously define bad to establish bad; a brief survey of common metrics and how something ranks is acceptable.