4 ms·

How is prothletising a free tool an MLM scheme?

z9znz 4y ago
I'm guessing the parent poster really meant something like "hyped snake oil". There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming. In fact, it is poorly designed for most software engineering goals, short of just simple one-file, few line scripts. But those could just as well have been written in many other languages. Python just happened to be installed by default on most Linux systems, and it was more powerful than *sh. Just maybe one could argue that it was more accessible than perl because it had fewer $#!@$ symbols. If Python had not tried to offer OOP features (entirely built with duct tape, hotglue, and post-it notes) maybe Python projects wouldn't be such a mess. Simple procedural code would be better than the @decorator littered mess which is required to make Python have OO features approximating (but not fully supporting) other languages.
- DigiDigiorno 4y ago
  Referring to Python hype as "snake oil" is hilarious; I recommend anyone arguing the underlying thought use it.
  - z9znz 4y ago
    I use Python all day every day. It's horrible compared to many other languages I have used. There are many versions of hype promoted for Python. Coal powered steam locomotives were great in their day, before there were better alternatives. But we don't irrationally hold the mentality that there is nothing better and why would you need anything else anyway? Tell me any library which can only be built for Python? Tell me any feature of Python which does not exist in one or more other languages? Then I'll tell you at least some features which exist in several other languages but which do not in Python. Python is inferior, and frankly anyone who is infatuated with it is ignorant of the other, better options.
    - DigiDigiorno 4y ago
      Anyone who is "infatuated" with ANY tool is likely ignorant of alternatives. That said, I think python is a very convenient wrapper for lower language utilizing scipy libraries. I also think it is great for quick prototyping. (It's been a couple years, but I even prototyped PySide Qt stuff in ipython notebooks, now Jupyter notebooks, back in the day). Now, simply the popularity (perhaps created by luck), led to a huge ecosystem of scipy tools for the science community. That in-and-of-itself snowballed into a reason to use it. Could that have happened to a different language? Yes. but that doesn't invalidate that it DID happen to Python. Perhaps your day job forces you to use the Python hammer for a screw problem; I'm sure that problem frustrates a lot of us working people, but I don't think it's inferior for the specific uses I outlined.
      - z9znz 4y ago
        I guess that's the problem. Python is just fine for many narrow tasks. But the people who use it, or the people who manage teams who use it, don't know how important it is to consider proper tooling when it comes time to turn the small thing into a big thing. There's nothing wrong with using Python and its great libraries for some purposes. But none of those cases mean that Python is a good language. And frankly, the better the library is, the less Python language features you would use directly. The powerful libraries hide the failures of the parent language. But as soon as you need to build something around your solution, unless you have another library which does the new thing you need (and encapsulates your solution neatly), then you will end up using real Python, on a larger scale. Then you will start disliking it.
    - eesmith 4y ago
      > Tell me any library which can only be built for Python? Are you really making the "every programming language is Turing-computable" argument? All your talk of features is missing an important point - Python is one of the few languages designed with insight from how to develop a programming language for non-programmers. In Python's case, experience drawn from ABC. These are people for whom "public class java { public static void" is a barrier to entry. For whom diagnosing segfaults is arcane knowledge. And for whom hygienic macros sounds like a bathroom product. I like Python because it's a language that my colleagues - most of whom are not software developers but who do some programming for their research - can productively use. Even with all the complexity of modern Python. So no, there are zero features in Python which don't exist in other programming languages. And it doesn't matter. What better options do you suggest to a grad student in chemistry, biology, or physics?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming. The amount of anger people have that things that, in fact, determine suitability for various applications are not the things which ought to do so in their own mental models of the world is... interesting.
  - z9znz 4y ago
    If I hand you a dull butter knife and some loose, rusty pliers and ask you to fix a car engine, you should be angry. Of course, if all you've ever known is sub-par tools, then you won't see a problem. This is a pointless conversation. You cannot know what you don't know. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Blub_paradox https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Blub_paradox
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Of course, if all you've ever known is sub-par tools, then you won't see a problem. Yeah, sure. What makes you think that I haven't used a wide variety of programming languages covering every paradigm from unstructured imperative to procedural to functional (pure and impure) to OOP to relational to logic to...? When I am amused at the anger people have about their idealized mental model of what should matter not being what actual does matter most to practical utility, I’m not speaking from ignorance of the different features of programming languages and the theoretical and practical benefits they bring. I am speaking from four decades of programming and understanding all that, as well as the human and social side of the activity.
- paddy_m 4y ago
  > There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming. Compared to Java and JS there is. The lack of operator overloading would make numpy matrix manipulations absolutely painful in those languages. It's just a chance that numpy wasn't built on top of ruby.

I'm guessing the parent poster really meant something like "hyped snake oil". There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming. In fact, it is poorly designed for most software engineering goals, short of just simple one-file, few line scripts. But those could just as well have been written in many other languages. Python just happened to be installed by default on most Linux systems, and it was more powerful than *sh. Just maybe one could argue that it was more accessible than perl because it had fewer $#!@$ symbols. If Python had not tried to offer OOP features (entirely built with duct tape, hotglue, and post-it notes) maybe Python projects wouldn't be such a mess. Simple procedural code would be better than the @decorator littered mess which is required to make Python have OO features approximating (but not fully supporting) other languages.

DigiDigiorno 4y ago
Referring to Python hype as "snake oil" is hilarious; I recommend anyone arguing the underlying thought use it.
- z9znz 4y ago
  I use Python all day every day. It's horrible compared to many other languages I have used. There are many versions of hype promoted for Python. Coal powered steam locomotives were great in their day, before there were better alternatives. But we don't irrationally hold the mentality that there is nothing better and why would you need anything else anyway? Tell me any library which can only be built for Python? Tell me any feature of Python which does not exist in one or more other languages? Then I'll tell you at least some features which exist in several other languages but which do not in Python. Python is inferior, and frankly anyone who is infatuated with it is ignorant of the other, better options.
  - DigiDigiorno 4y ago
    Anyone who is "infatuated" with ANY tool is likely ignorant of alternatives. That said, I think python is a very convenient wrapper for lower language utilizing scipy libraries. I also think it is great for quick prototyping. (It's been a couple years, but I even prototyped PySide Qt stuff in ipython notebooks, now Jupyter notebooks, back in the day). Now, simply the popularity (perhaps created by luck), led to a huge ecosystem of scipy tools for the science community. That in-and-of-itself snowballed into a reason to use it. Could that have happened to a different language? Yes. but that doesn't invalidate that it DID happen to Python. Perhaps your day job forces you to use the Python hammer for a screw problem; I'm sure that problem frustrates a lot of us working people, but I don't think it's inferior for the specific uses I outlined.
    - z9znz 4y ago
      I guess that's the problem. Python is just fine for many narrow tasks. But the people who use it, or the people who manage teams who use it, don't know how important it is to consider proper tooling when it comes time to turn the small thing into a big thing. There's nothing wrong with using Python and its great libraries for some purposes. But none of those cases mean that Python is a good language. And frankly, the better the library is, the less Python language features you would use directly. The powerful libraries hide the failures of the parent language. But as soon as you need to build something around your solution, unless you have another library which does the new thing you need (and encapsulates your solution neatly), then you will end up using real Python, on a larger scale. Then you will start disliking it.
  - eesmith 4y ago
    > Tell me any library which can only be built for Python? Are you really making the "every programming language is Turing-computable" argument? All your talk of features is missing an important point - Python is one of the few languages designed with insight from how to develop a programming language for non-programmers. In Python's case, experience drawn from ABC. These are people for whom "public class java { public static void" is a barrier to entry. For whom diagnosing segfaults is arcane knowledge. And for whom hygienic macros sounds like a bathroom product. I like Python because it's a language that my colleagues - most of whom are not software developers but who do some programming for their research - can productively use. Even with all the complexity of modern Python. So no, there are zero features in Python which don't exist in other programming languages. And it doesn't matter. What better options do you suggest to a grad student in chemistry, biology, or physics?
dragonwriter 4y ago
> There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming. The amount of anger people have that things that, in fact, determine suitability for various applications are not the things which ought to do so in their own mental models of the world is... interesting.
- z9znz 4y ago
  If I hand you a dull butter knife and some loose, rusty pliers and ask you to fix a car engine, you should be angry. Of course, if all you've ever known is sub-par tools, then you won't see a problem. This is a pointless conversation. You cannot know what you don't know. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Blub_paradox https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Blub_paradox
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Of course, if all you've ever known is sub-par tools, then you won't see a problem. Yeah, sure. What makes you think that I haven't used a wide variety of programming languages covering every paradigm from unstructured imperative to procedural to functional (pure and impure) to OOP to relational to logic to...? When I am amused at the anger people have about their idealized mental model of what should matter not being what actual does matter most to practical utility, I’m not speaking from ignorance of the different features of programming languages and the theoretical and practical benefits they bring. I am speaking from four decades of programming and understanding all that, as well as the human and social side of the activity.
paddy_m 4y ago
> There is absolutely nothing about Python which makes it especially suited to scientific programming or any other kind of programming. Compared to Java and JS there is. The lack of operator overloading would make numpy matrix manipulations absolutely painful in those languages. It's just a chance that numpy wasn't built on top of ruby.