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Every single "This language is good" or "This language is bad" take really needs to always come with a "for what, exactly." "This wrench is really bad for hamm

by jrm4 3y ago

Every single "This language is good" or "This language is bad" take really needs to always come with a "for what, exactly." "This wrench is really bad for hammering nails!"

the_af 3y ago
Agreed. But I also think it's fair to criticize general purpose languages on general grounds :) It's just that this article isn't very good at it.
- jrm4 3y ago
  It's fair, but the other thing happens WAY more. It honestly just strikes me as very odd how e.g. even "just use multiple languages" is done a whole lot, but not really talked about as a good idea (as much as MY LANGUAGE IS GOOD AND YOURS IS NOT)
bPspGiJT8Y 3y ago
The author of this article does highlight the cases where using Python didn't work out well for them, in fact multiple times.
- dekhn 3y ago
  The context the author was working in was a large corporation with a demanding collection of services that needed to be managed. Many of the tools to manage those servers were written in Python, since many people know it, it was already widely used at the org, it had good support for C++ interop (also widely used at the org), and Java was found to be really clunky for sysadmin tooling. I've seen both sides of it- I worked in the same sub-org as Jos, and my very first job was cleaning up a large pile of incredibly important and variable-quality Python code used to manage a fleet of database servers. the code was tools to do useful things like implement failover of the replication master (across ~90-120 shards) from one region to another for maintainence. Or apply schema changes across all those master shards. Or monitor the shards at runtime. At times, the code would Exception (literally, crash with a Python exception) during the middle of an important but routine maintainence, and the migration would be half-done. I was hired- literally, this was my job- to add tests to the code until it was much more reliable. Working on that convinced me that rather than type-safety (which is nice, and can be used optionally in python), high test quality and high test coverage of paths used in production were more important to keep the code running smoothly. I just wish Python hadn't made strings a sequence type, as one of the most common errors at the org was accidentally e m a i l i n g e v e r y s i n g l e letter in a To: string. IE, if it was "To: bore-sre@stoogle.com", then b@, o@, r@, e@, etc, would all get an email saying "Process failed..." And r@ would reply (because he's rob pike) saying "your python program has a bug...."

by jrm4 3y ago

Every single "This language is good" or "This language is bad" take really needs to always come with a "for what, exactly." "This wrench is really bad for hammering nails!"

the_af 3y ago

Agreed. But I also think it's fair to criticize general purpose languages on general grounds :) It's just that this article isn't very good at it.

jrm4 3y ago
It's fair, but the other thing happens WAY more. It honestly just strikes me as very odd how e.g. even "just use multiple languages" is done a whole lot, but not really talked about as a good idea (as much as MY LANGUAGE IS GOOD AND YOURS IS NOT)

bPspGiJT8Y 3y ago

The author of this article does highlight the cases where using Python didn't work out well for them, in fact multiple times.

dekhn 3y ago
The context the author was working in was a large corporation with a demanding collection of services that needed to be managed. Many of the tools to manage those servers were written in Python, since many people know it, it was already widely used at the org, it had good support for C++ interop (also widely used at the org), and Java was found to be really clunky for sysadmin tooling. I've seen both sides of it- I worked in the same sub-org as Jos, and my very first job was cleaning up a large pile of incredibly important and variable-quality Python code used to manage a fleet of database servers. the code was tools to do useful things like implement failover of the replication master (across ~90-120 shards) from one region to another for maintainence. Or apply schema changes across all those master shards. Or monitor the shards at runtime. At times, the code would Exception (literally, crash with a Python exception) during the middle of an important but routine maintainence, and the migration would be half-done. I was hired- literally, this was my job- to add tests to the code until it was much more reliable. Working on that convinced me that rather than type-safety (which is nice, and can be used optionally in python), high test quality and high test coverage of paths used in production were more important to keep the code running smoothly. I just wish Python hadn't made strings a sequence type, as one of the most common errors at the org was accidentally e m a i l i n g e v e r y s i n g l e letter in a To: string. IE, if it was "To: bore-sre@stoogle.com", then b@, o@, r@, e@, etc, would all get an email saying "Process failed..." And r@ would reply (because he's rob pike) saying "your python program has a bug...."