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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 pro

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.
- kortex 4y ago
  That sounds frustrating, however easy_install hasn't been relevant for years, and obviously 2.x is EoL. Anaconda is generally better for beginners since it manages basically everything for you. Hardly a disaster. You basically need NPM if you want to work with any kind of libraries, and I'd say the Anaconda system comes with way more ergonomics out of the box, so that's more or less a wash.

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.

kortex 4y ago
That sounds frustrating, however easy_install hasn't been relevant for years, and obviously 2.x is EoL. Anaconda is generally better for beginners since it manages basically everything for you. Hardly a disaster. You basically need NPM if you want to work with any kind of libraries, and I'd say the Anaconda system comes with way more ergonomics out of the box, so that's more or less a wash.