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Python is the 2nd best language for everything. It doesn’t excel at anything, but anything a software can do, it can be done in Python somehow. So, a great pi
by alanfranz 4y ago
Python is the 2nd best language for everything.
It doesn’t excel at anything, but anything a software can do, it can be done in Python somehow.
So, a great pick when you’ve got no idea where you’re going to, when you’re prototyping, when you don’t care about performance or perfection.
I agree that for large scale systems when you already know what you’re doing, Python shows its limits quite soon (and we should add the problems with missing/slow type checking that slows down large scale systems development).
- pharmakom 4y ago> Python is the 2nd best language for everything. Huh? Why? You can barely deploy it to Web. it doesn't scale perfoance wise you can't built robust abstractions The REPL is merely OK You can barely ship working code without containers the syntax is hard to manipulate programmatically Python has inertia but it's holding us back
- l33tman 4y agoWell for starters, web deployment isn't "everything". Python is the de-facto go-to language for research or general prototyping, where not everyone is a programming wiz keeping track of the latest trendy new compiled language. Not everyone can compile stuff even.. :) Having said that, I've deployed two large Django projects on the web with tons of customers and it runs and scales just fine, and it's a DREAM to maintain and develop for than for example Java.. I would go so far as to say the opposite, if you haven't used Python for web deployment you've been missing out! (you lose some efficiency I'm sure but you gain other things)
- pharmakom 4y agoI was talking about running in the Web browser. it's not everything, but it's an important part of everything in my book.
- sireat 4y agohttps://github.com/pyodide/pyodide https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide is pretty amazing for running Python client side in the browser. You could run notebooks entirely client side https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ The startup is slow but otherwise it is pretty functional.
- renox 4y agoYou have good points but "the syntax is hard to manipulate programmatically"?? Maybe you haven't noticed but Lisp is now a tiny niche and most new languages aren't homoiconic either..
- pharmakom 4y agoI don't think that proves anything. If we had "JavaLisp" in the browser instead of JavaScript then Lisp would be very popular. Besides that, Python is harder to manipulate than many non-Lisps, such as JavaScript and Go.
- kazinator 4y agoHere, we can set Lisp aside and take grandparent comment's definition of syntax to be concrete, character-level syntax. Python concrete syntax is harder to manipulate programmatically compared to Javascript concrete syntax. For instance, to insert one statement into another, we need to traverse the lines of that syntax and add the right amount of indentation. We can't just plant the syntax into the desired spot and be done with it.
- alanfranz 4y agoWhat is another language working that well in a larger number of areas?
- pharmakom 4y agoClojure JavaScript Typescript OCaml Haskell F#
- alanfranz 4y agoAny JVM language or .NET language will take more to interface with native libraries, it’s not the same. Ocaml is very niche, I feel it’s an hard sell for a general purpose language. Haskell, 3x that. JS and TS, could be. But are they so much better than Python, if better at all?
- revelio 4y agoNative library interfacing isn't really Python's strong suit, interpreter plugins are quite painful to write. .NET has P/Invoke which is much nicer. JVM is getting Panama+jextract, which is the nicest yet. You can go straight from header files to pure Java bindings which don't need any extra native code at all. But it's not shipped yet :(
- baq 4y agoPython has had cffi since figuratively forever, so I’m not sure why you compare native modules to P/Invoke?
- revelio 4y agoMost important libraries with native components are using C extensions, not cffi.
- alanfranz 4y agoWhat is an “interpreter plugin?” Writing a Python C extension is not that painful, it’s quite well supported. And you’ve got cffi and ctypes as well.
- sigi64 4y agoPython, the language with global interpret lock, Is not the 2nd best language for everything, especially in the age od multicore processors.
- baq 4y agoPython is the practical language for when you do your cpu intensive tasks outside of it as a feature, since the GIL isn’t a problem with io parallelism. You’d do better complaining about still nascent, compared to alternatives, async support or lack of jit in the official implementation.
- smallerfish 4y agoTo steal from another thread, Python is the McDonald's of languages - it's ubiquitous, it doesn't take much effort, and it's really not very good. The trope about it being the 2nd best language for everything isn't correct. It's taught in universities because it has a very short time to gratification, and the basic syntax is quite intuitive. Academics latched onto it for ML because of some excellent libraries, and it became established as a vital part of the ecosystem from there. But it's a nightmare to support a moderate to large codebase in production, packaging continues to be a mess, and it's full of weird quirks. Great for weekend projects, but for pete's sake take a minute and port them into something more reliable before going to production with them.
- alanfranz 4y agoI think you’re focusing too much on the letter, rather than the idea.