6 ms·

I use to want this. Then I learned JavaScript, and decided it's a much better language for the browser than Python is.

vosper 4y ago
And if you want types then Typescript is a lot nicer than using Python's typing stuff. I used to love Python's list comprehensions etc, but since JS got .map, .filter, and all the other new things I really don't miss them. My impression of async is that it's much nicer in JS than in Python. In the new version of my employer's web app we are moving from JS front-end with Python (Flask) backend to using as much Typescript as possible, and only using Python where we need data-sciency / ML libraries. We'll call out to it from our Typecript backend as-needed, but will do as little in Python (and especially in Pandas) as possible.
- oofbey 4y ago
  I prefer Python over Javascript in almost every way. But python's async is a dumpster fire. It's quite natural in Javascript. Unfortunately Javascript makes you do almost everything async, no choices. Which makes you think that way. Which is awkward to start with and can lead to a lot of strange corner cases. In python unless you're really trying to squeeze performance out of a system you almost never need async.
  - tempest_ 4y ago
    It doesn't help that it feels like pythons async ecosystem doesn't really know how it works. There is all sorts of blocking code in python async libraries and no one seems bothered by it. I guess it could be that they just don't care about this type of thing to begin with and have no idea why they are using async other than they heard "it is faster". Meanwhile I am pulling my hair out trying to squeeze a more reqs/s out of an on premise server.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    python's async mostly works as long as you're using async-native libraries. if you can await it, it's okay. it only gets disastrous when you have to start mangling callback code into promises. although i really do love javascript's ability to await synchronous functions without it causing any errors. i'm sure it's less performant, but sometimes i just don't care.
  - globuous 4y ago
    I want to love async. But it’s a nightmare to debug. To this day I still cannot debug tortoise ORM. I dont understand why I can await so easily in my browsers JS console but not in pdb.
  - egeozcan 4y ago
    I want to use Python more often but having to care about significant white space is a much bigger downer for me than the async being a "dumpster fire" and I also don't think async in Python is so bad. I'm saying this as someone who has been programming in many languages since more than 20 years.
    - klibertp 4y ago
      What kind of editor do you use for writing code? If you need to "care" about significant white space, it might be that you're simply using the wrong tool for the job. Working with Python since 2.4 (among tens of other languages) I honestly don't remember a single situation where I had to care...
      - egeozcan 4y ago
        It depends, I like using vim on a remote computer and use IntelliJ locally. It usually breaks when I'm trying to refactor, copying and pasting etc.
        klibertp 4y ago
        I was using Vim for a few years and later switched to Emacs. Both provide commands for handling indentation of lines and blocks of code. You just paste and select/mark a block, then indent or unindent until the first line of the block is aligned with the preceding line in a place where you pasted the code. It's true that you can't auto-indent on paste, though. Still, it never slowed me down noticeably. It's a trade-off, to be sure: you need to align indents manually, but then you don't ever have to deal with things like this: if (sth) sth1(); sth2();
        egeozcan 4y ago
        Yeah, the thing is, if you do forget to align things, which is a thing if your eyes are not the sharpest, weird things can happen, especially when you are writing scripts as if there's no tomorrow. Those experiments usually end up being written for the node.js runtime because I really, really hate aligning lines when I'm writing one-off scripts.
- yashap 4y ago
  Same - I still like Python for scripting, and Scala is still the language I have most fun coding in, but … JavaScript got decent, and TypeScript got really good. I used to want Python in the browser, but no longer see the need. TypeScript is just a terrific choice for basically any web SPA. My current company is full stack TS (React/TS/MobX on the web, React Native/TS/MobX on mobile, RESTful Express/TS/Postgres/Redis services), and it’s the most productive, straightforward stack I’ve ever used. Perfectly decent performance too. A single language that is legitimately a great choice for most use cases on the web, mobile and backend, hard to compete with that.
  - davnn 4y ago
    I have a similar language preference. Do you think a RESTful TypeScript backend is more productive than a Scala alternative?
    - vosper 4y ago
      I can't compare to Scala, but unless you know you need an API for a web frontend then I would take a look at tRPC or other "zero API" systems (Blitz is another one, but I'm a little unclear on where they are in their pivot). It's a little hard to describe how magical it feels to actually use. It completely removes needing to think about an API. You don't think about endpoints, about (de)serialization, about the mechanics of fetching, or how arguments are passed. You just call you functions by name from the front-end. All your types are preserved so that if you change the signature of your backend function Typescript will catch it everywhere on front-end. If you use react-hook-form then you can export the zod validators that you wrote for the backend and import them to the frontend, and now your client-side code is using the exact same validator as your backend does. Change your server side validation and now your client-side form won't compile and you'll know exactly why. Honestly it feels like the missing link in fullstack dev to me. Typescript brought the types and the compiler, and tRPC makes it feel like your entire back and front-end are one system.
      - davnn 4y ago
        Very interesting, I didn‘t know about tRPC yet. I remember in the early days of ScalaJS there were similar ambitions, but I believe it never really caught on. I will definitely give it a go, thanks.
hiccuphippo 4y ago
Similar opinion here. But another reason is now I tend to write my own code rather than depend on third party libraries and that removes one argument for making a choice.
shswkna 4y ago
I think this thread misses the point. The motivation for pyscript is the accessibility of Python, because it can be adopted even by persons without years of programming experience. I see it regularly in my company with youngsters. This alone makes it deserve its existence and further pursuit (“for the other 99%”). Imagine a world where only mechanics could drive cars, because the way they worked “would be fine with him or her” but for everyone else there would be a steep learning curve to overcome initially - which most won’t embark on because there are other goals in life too. Keeping with the analogy, normal cars are still not suited for Grand Prix racing or other heavy use cases. But this is not needed for the 99%. Its the same with Python, its limitations, and the better suitability of other languages for a mix of specialised and performance use cases.
- codedokode 4y ago
  Creating an application is more like building your own car, not merely driving it. I think it would be great if more people would be able to create web applications, but there should be better technologies than shipping a ten-megabytes interpreter with every HTML page. Also Python is not easy for non-developers. It might be easy for middle school level tasks like replacing a word in a string. However if you want to use a database, you have to learn about object-oriented programming, property descriptors, ORM and decorators, all of these are difficult topics and libraries like SQLAlchemy are not for beginners (just look at its documentation. It doesn't even explain what ORM means).
- tgv 4y ago
  > Imagine a world where only mechanics could drive cars A closer metaphor is: imagine a world where everybody builds their own car. That would be a bit of a mess.
- xigoi 4y ago
  Isn't JavaScript also easy to learn? There are many people who have learned to use it for web development in a coding bootcamp or something and don't know much else about programming.
- mattlondon 4y ago
  I don't agree that python is more easily adopted by people learning. Perhaps the older versions of python sure, with contrived "hello world" examples where there is not much going on. But with modern python it is a fucking disaster with pip and anaconda and easy_install and 2.x vs 3.x still lingering (Macs) and type hints or not and list comprehensions being incomprehensible etc and the use of indentation for scoping leading to frequent errors from people learning (I never understood why indentation was cited as a good thing for learners - please go run a "teach kids to code" class one day and you'll spend 50% of your time fixing indentation errors in their code!) Javascript is everywhere on every device with a browser - if you can load a web page, you can start coding in javascript right away. No install needed - you have a REPL right in your browser. Granted, NPM is a mess but that is not mandatory and it is still perfectly possible to write & ship modern production JS code without NPM or build-steps being involved. Modern JS is very powerful, and if you can stomach a build-step TS makes it even better.

And if you want types then Typescript is a lot nicer than using Python's typing stuff. I used to love Python's list comprehensions etc, but since JS got .map, .filter, and all the other new things I really don't miss them. My impression of async is that it's much nicer in JS than in Python. In the new version of my employer's web app we are moving from JS front-end with Python (Flask) backend to using as much Typescript as possible, and only using Python where we need data-sciency / ML libraries. We'll call out to it from our Typecript backend as-needed, but will do as little in Python (and especially in Pandas) as possible.

oofbey 4y ago
I prefer Python over Javascript in almost every way. But python's async is a dumpster fire. It's quite natural in Javascript. Unfortunately Javascript makes you do almost everything async, no choices. Which makes you think that way. Which is awkward to start with and can lead to a lot of strange corner cases. In python unless you're really trying to squeeze performance out of a system you almost never need async.
- tempest_ 4y ago
  It doesn't help that it feels like pythons async ecosystem doesn't really know how it works. There is all sorts of blocking code in python async libraries and no one seems bothered by it. I guess it could be that they just don't care about this type of thing to begin with and have no idea why they are using async other than they heard "it is faster". Meanwhile I am pulling my hair out trying to squeeze a more reqs/s out of an on premise server.
- notatoad 4y ago
  python's async mostly works as long as you're using async-native libraries. if you can await it, it's okay. it only gets disastrous when you have to start mangling callback code into promises. although i really do love javascript's ability to await synchronous functions without it causing any errors. i'm sure it's less performant, but sometimes i just don't care.
- globuous 4y ago
  I want to love async. But it’s a nightmare to debug. To this day I still cannot debug tortoise ORM. I dont understand why I can await so easily in my browsers JS console but not in pdb.
- egeozcan 4y ago
  I want to use Python more often but having to care about significant white space is a much bigger downer for me than the async being a "dumpster fire" and I also don't think async in Python is so bad. I'm saying this as someone who has been programming in many languages since more than 20 years.
  - klibertp 4y ago
    What kind of editor do you use for writing code? If you need to "care" about significant white space, it might be that you're simply using the wrong tool for the job. Working with Python since 2.4 (among tens of other languages) I honestly don't remember a single situation where I had to care...
    - egeozcan 4y ago
      It depends, I like using vim on a remote computer and use IntelliJ locally. It usually breaks when I'm trying to refactor, copying and pasting etc.
      - klibertp 4y ago
        I was using Vim for a few years and later switched to Emacs. Both provide commands for handling indentation of lines and blocks of code. You just paste and select/mark a block, then indent or unindent until the first line of the block is aligned with the preceding line in a place where you pasted the code. It's true that you can't auto-indent on paste, though. Still, it never slowed me down noticeably. It's a trade-off, to be sure: you need to align indents manually, but then you don't ever have to deal with things like this: if (sth) sth1(); sth2();
        egeozcan 4y ago
        Yeah, the thing is, if you do forget to align things, which is a thing if your eyes are not the sharpest, weird things can happen, especially when you are writing scripts as if there's no tomorrow. Those experiments usually end up being written for the node.js runtime because I really, really hate aligning lines when I'm writing one-off scripts.
yashap 4y ago
Same - I still like Python for scripting, and Scala is still the language I have most fun coding in, but … JavaScript got decent, and TypeScript got really good. I used to want Python in the browser, but no longer see the need. TypeScript is just a terrific choice for basically any web SPA. My current company is full stack TS (React/TS/MobX on the web, React Native/TS/MobX on mobile, RESTful Express/TS/Postgres/Redis services), and it’s the most productive, straightforward stack I’ve ever used. Perfectly decent performance too. A single language that is legitimately a great choice for most use cases on the web, mobile and backend, hard to compete with that.
- davnn 4y ago
  I have a similar language preference. Do you think a RESTful TypeScript backend is more productive than a Scala alternative?
  - vosper 4y ago
    I can't compare to Scala, but unless you know you need an API for a web frontend then I would take a look at tRPC or other "zero API" systems (Blitz is another one, but I'm a little unclear on where they are in their pivot). It's a little hard to describe how magical it feels to actually use. It completely removes needing to think about an API. You don't think about endpoints, about (de)serialization, about the mechanics of fetching, or how arguments are passed. You just call you functions by name from the front-end. All your types are preserved so that if you change the signature of your backend function Typescript will catch it everywhere on front-end. If you use react-hook-form then you can export the zod validators that you wrote for the backend and import them to the frontend, and now your client-side code is using the exact same validator as your backend does. Change your server side validation and now your client-side form won't compile and you'll know exactly why. Honestly it feels like the missing link in fullstack dev to me. Typescript brought the types and the compiler, and tRPC makes it feel like your entire back and front-end are one system.
    - davnn 4y ago
      Very interesting, I didn‘t know about tRPC yet. I remember in the early days of ScalaJS there were similar ambitions, but I believe it never really caught on. I will definitely give it a go, thanks.

hiccuphippo 4y ago

Similar opinion here. But another reason is now I tend to write my own code rather than depend on third party libraries and that removes one argument for making a choice.

shswkna 4y ago

I think this thread misses the point. The motivation for pyscript is the accessibility of Python, because it can be adopted even by persons without years of programming experience. I see it regularly in my company with youngsters. This alone makes it deserve its existence and further pursuit (“for the other 99%”). Imagine a world where only mechanics could drive cars, because the way they worked “would be fine with him or her” but for everyone else there would be a steep learning curve to overcome initially - which most won’t embark on because there are other goals in life too. Keeping with the analogy, normal cars are still not suited for Grand Prix racing or other heavy use cases. But this is not needed for the 99%. Its the same with Python, its limitations, and the better suitability of other languages for a mix of specialised and performance use cases.

codedokode 4y ago
Creating an application is more like building your own car, not merely driving it. I think it would be great if more people would be able to create web applications, but there should be better technologies than shipping a ten-megabytes interpreter with every HTML page. Also Python is not easy for non-developers. It might be easy for middle school level tasks like replacing a word in a string. However if you want to use a database, you have to learn about object-oriented programming, property descriptors, ORM and decorators, all of these are difficult topics and libraries like SQLAlchemy are not for beginners (just look at its documentation. It doesn't even explain what ORM means).
tgv 4y ago
> Imagine a world where only mechanics could drive cars A closer metaphor is: imagine a world where everybody builds their own car. That would be a bit of a mess.
xigoi 4y ago
Isn't JavaScript also easy to learn? There are many people who have learned to use it for web development in a coding bootcamp or something and don't know much else about programming.
mattlondon 4y ago
I don't agree that python is more easily adopted by people learning. Perhaps the older versions of python sure, with contrived "hello world" examples where there is not much going on. But with modern python it is a fucking disaster with pip and anaconda and easy_install and 2.x vs 3.x still lingering (Macs) and type hints or not and list comprehensions being incomprehensible etc and the use of indentation for scoping leading to frequent errors from people learning (I never understood why indentation was cited as a good thing for learners - please go run a "teach kids to code" class one day and you'll spend 50% of your time fixing indentation errors in their code!) Javascript is everywhere on every device with a browser - if you can load a web page, you can start coding in javascript right away. No install needed - you have a REPL right in your browser. Granted, NPM is a mess but that is not mandatory and it is still perfectly possible to write & ship modern production JS code without NPM or build-steps being involved. Modern JS is very powerful, and if you can stomach a build-step TS makes it even better.