3 ms·

Python allows one to save development time in exchange for execution time

by Yajirobe 4y ago

morelisp 4y ago
Python hasn't saved me development time since distutils was the right and only way to build things.
zasdffaa 4y ago
Get beyond a certain size of python program and you lose dev time. IOW you lose both. It's not a huge size either.
- Yajirobe 4y ago
  Like... youtube?
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    could you elaborate please - is all of youtube including the streaming, all python?
stonogo 4y ago
That's only an excuse if you're sociopathically profit-oriented. The program is developed orders of magnitude fewer times than it is run. Shitty performance, like pollution, is an externality that can be ignored but should not.
- geysersam 4y ago
  Shitty performance certainly is bad, but it is not an externality like emissions into the atmosphere. The fundamental difference is that the customer (and only the customer) is harmed by bad performance, while emissions harms everyone.
  - tylerchr 4y ago
    I'm not so sure. Emissions don't harm everyone instantly; they affect people disproportionately and only impact everyone over time as the effects accumulate. Sure, maybe bad performance only affects the customer initially, but can't you help but wonder what the cumulative opportunity cost of bad performance on civilization has been? The predominant perception among nontechnical people is that computers are fundamentally unreliable and slow. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that might be holding up the rate of innovation.
    - notriddle 4y ago
      By this reasoning, though, there is no such thing as localized harm. The reason I can't abide by the idea that "there's no such thing as localized harm" is that, when you actually try to analyze nonlocal harms caused by personal decisions, you get swallowed up by the butterfly of doom. It's the butterfly effect. For example, a lot of software that actually gets written is a net negative to society, even if it functions perfectly. So does making it more efficient actually benefit anybody? And a lot of other software is embedded in organizations that will add features to the software until it fails, expanding like an ideal gas to fill whatever space it's given, so even if you make it more efficient and less failure-prone, you're only really delaying the inevitable anyway. However, making a bureaucratic organization less efficient might not actually stop it; consider, for example, how the Social Security Card was originally engineered to be unusable as a national ID, but got used as one anyway, so now the United States not only has a national ID that most citizens didn't want, but we're stuck with a bad one. However, identity theft might actually be considered just another case of externalities, and if the bureaucrats had to eat the cost of easy-to-forge national IDs, this problem might have gotten fixed. I think you can analyze nonlocal harms, but not using informal reasoning in a chatroom. There are too many possible interactions in the real world to fit them all in your head. You end up with an impossible-to-analyze infinite regress. Instead, nonlocal harms should probably expect real-world measurements to prove that they actually exist and aren't entirely being washed out by the much larger effect sizes of unrelated phenomena.
    - geysersam 4y ago
      Externalities is a concept in economic theory. It shows how net negative behaviour occurs, even when all actors act perfectly rational and have perfect information (while optimizing for their own gain). Bad software does simply not map to this concept in the same way environmental damage does. In your example people use bad software, against their interest, despite better alternatives.
wizofaus 4y ago
Except as a developer I lose lots of time if I have to wait long for my code (esp. Unit tests) to run. Having said that larger projects in C/C++ are often very slow to build (esp. if dependencies are not well defined and certain header files affect huge numbers of source files - a problem that doesn't exist with higher level languages). But even if using a particular language and framework saves developer time, it rarely seems to translate into developers using that saved time to bother optimizing where it might really count.
david422 4y ago
But it just comes back to bite you later on maintenance costs.
- april_22 4y ago
  You can't have everything, right?
pavon 4y ago
I've not found that to be the case. The first draft might get done faster, but then I spend more time debugging issues in dynamic languages that only show up at runtime that the compiler would find in other languages. And then more time optimizing the code, adding caching, moving to more advanced algorithms, and rewriting parts in C just to get it to run at a reasonable speed when the naive approach I implement in other languages is fast enough on first try. For most tasks, modern mid-level statically typed languages like C#, Go, Kotlin really are the sweet spot for productivity. Languages like Python, Ruby and JS are a false economy that appear more productive than they really are.

Python allows one to save development time in exchange for execution time

morelisp 4y ago

Python hasn't saved me development time since distutils was the right and only way to build things.

zasdffaa 4y ago

Get beyond a certain size of python program and you lose dev time. IOW you lose both. It's not a huge size either.

Yajirobe 4y ago
Like... youtube?
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  could you elaborate please - is all of youtube including the streaming, all python?

stonogo 4y ago

That's only an excuse if you're sociopathically profit-oriented. The program is developed orders of magnitude fewer times than it is run. Shitty performance, like pollution, is an externality that can be ignored but should not.

geysersam 4y ago
Shitty performance certainly is bad, but it is not an externality like emissions into the atmosphere. The fundamental difference is that the customer (and only the customer) is harmed by bad performance, while emissions harms everyone.
- tylerchr 4y ago
  I'm not so sure. Emissions don't harm everyone instantly; they affect people disproportionately and only impact everyone over time as the effects accumulate. Sure, maybe bad performance only affects the customer initially, but can't you help but wonder what the cumulative opportunity cost of bad performance on civilization has been? The predominant perception among nontechnical people is that computers are fundamentally unreliable and slow. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that might be holding up the rate of innovation.
  - notriddle 4y ago
    By this reasoning, though, there is no such thing as localized harm. The reason I can't abide by the idea that "there's no such thing as localized harm" is that, when you actually try to analyze nonlocal harms caused by personal decisions, you get swallowed up by the butterfly of doom. It's the butterfly effect. For example, a lot of software that actually gets written is a net negative to society, even if it functions perfectly. So does making it more efficient actually benefit anybody? And a lot of other software is embedded in organizations that will add features to the software until it fails, expanding like an ideal gas to fill whatever space it's given, so even if you make it more efficient and less failure-prone, you're only really delaying the inevitable anyway. However, making a bureaucratic organization less efficient might not actually stop it; consider, for example, how the Social Security Card was originally engineered to be unusable as a national ID, but got used as one anyway, so now the United States not only has a national ID that most citizens didn't want, but we're stuck with a bad one. However, identity theft might actually be considered just another case of externalities, and if the bureaucrats had to eat the cost of easy-to-forge national IDs, this problem might have gotten fixed. I think you can analyze nonlocal harms, but not using informal reasoning in a chatroom. There are too many possible interactions in the real world to fit them all in your head. You end up with an impossible-to-analyze infinite regress. Instead, nonlocal harms should probably expect real-world measurements to prove that they actually exist and aren't entirely being washed out by the much larger effect sizes of unrelated phenomena.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Externalities is a concept in economic theory. It shows how net negative behaviour occurs, even when all actors act perfectly rational and have perfect information (while optimizing for their own gain). Bad software does simply not map to this concept in the same way environmental damage does. In your example people use bad software, against their interest, despite better alternatives.

wizofaus 4y ago

Except as a developer I lose lots of time if I have to wait long for my code (esp. Unit tests) to run. Having said that larger projects in C/C++ are often very slow to build (esp. if dependencies are not well defined and certain header files affect huge numbers of source files - a problem that doesn't exist with higher level languages). But even if using a particular language and framework saves developer time, it rarely seems to translate into developers using that saved time to bother optimizing where it might really count.

david422 4y ago

But it just comes back to bite you later on maintenance costs.

april_22 4y ago
You can't have everything, right?

pavon 4y ago

I've not found that to be the case. The first draft might get done faster, but then I spend more time debugging issues in dynamic languages that only show up at runtime that the compiler would find in other languages. And then more time optimizing the code, adding caching, moving to more advanced algorithms, and rewriting parts in C just to get it to run at a reasonable speed when the naive approach I implement in other languages is fast enough on first try. For most tasks, modern mid-level statically typed languages like C#, Go, Kotlin really are the sweet spot for productivity. Languages like Python, Ruby and JS are a false economy that appear more productive than they really are.