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Why are we trying to fit a square peg into a round hole
by jeron 3y ago
Why are we trying to fit a square peg into a round hole
- gostsamo 3y agobecause some people have a square peg and not a round one.
- dinkleberg 3y agoIsn’t the answer obvious? They want to! There is no denying the importance and usefulness of web apps. You and me may be fine writing JS/TS, but many don’t want to. Why shouldn’t there be an option that works better for those folks?
- toyg 3y agoJS got popular on the server because it was the default option on the client. Makes sense that Python should get popular on the client because it's the default option on the server.
- cjaybo 3y agoSince when is Python the “default choice” for server side dev?
- wheelerof4te 3y agoSince never. People use either Java, PHP or NodeJs.
- zzzeek 3y agoyou might want to let Instagram or Github know those are the three choices
- cosmojg 3y agoI don't know where you work, but at my company, I'm struggling to get people to use anything but Python.
- IshKebab 3y agoMe too, but we don't do web stuff so Python makes at least some sense. Even if it is generally pretty awful.
- tamimio 3y agoGood luck with that! I think using python for anything beyond a simple script or PoC, should be taken as a red flag in development and immediately revise that decision of using it.
- wheelerof4te 3y agoEverything but the Crab language is worthless fluff.
- sriram_malhar 3y agoTell that to Netflix, youtube, instagram, quora, Uber and others.
- wheelerof4te 3y agoThose are all realy slow websites and it's clear why.
- hxii 3y agoCould you elaborate as to why? I’ve used to program in PHP and have moved (since I forgot most of PHP) to Python and I don’t get why people are displeased by it.
- toyg 3y ago> I don’t get why people are displeased by it. By and large "people" are not "displeased" by Python. But every language has a set of diehards, people who dedicated decades to this or that and resent adopting anything else. They will complain no matter what. Python is displacing a lot of other platforms in its continued rise, so the noise keeps going up. In addition, there are groups of nerds that love to formalize absolutely everything in their code, development speed be damned; and people who will optimize every line they write to an inch of their life (again, dev speed be damned). Both those camps are often uneasy in an ecosystem built on duck-typing, "practicality beats purity", and an overall approach favouring development speed over machine speed.
- toyg 3y ago"People" stuck in 2005, probably.
- dragonwriter 3y agoNever to the degree JS on the client is, though the early and strong support on PaaS/serverless systems gaveit something of an edge for certain server-side stuff, and it was popular for a long time (though not dominant) outside of that. Really, I think the main driver for isomorphic Python web libraries like this isn't general web apps (though they'll get used for that, too), but the putting frontends on data science, ML, etc., stuff where Python is the dominant tooling language.
- alfons_foobar 3y agoI agree, the datascience / ML crowd is _probably_ more interested in having something simple and easy/fast to implement to put in front of their data than in having a proper web framework with all the bells and whistles a software engineer would prefer.
- mr_toad 3y ago> putting frontends on data science Jupyter and Shiny seem adequate for that.
- solarkraft 3y agoWell, it's very popular. Which is why I'm a bit surprised that RPC/APIs still have as much overhead as they do, especially around types.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoMaybe it is easier to learn a framework within the ecosystem of a language you already know than to learn both a framework and a new language. Tons of software exists for this reason. For example, somewhat relevant here, web apps in R via R Shiny: https://www.rstudio.com/products/shiny/ https://www.rstudio.com/products/shiny/ (There is also Shiny for Python IIRC.)
- lijok 3y ago> Maybe it is easier to learn a framework within the ecosystem of a language you already know than to learn both a framework and a new language. I'm in this camp. For services that I'm building that are not heavily frontend reliant, I don't want to learn a whole new language and framework
- turtlebits 3y agoAgreed. There's a time and place for quick and dirty interfaces to kick off server-side code, which is what this feels like. There is definitely that barrier to entry to have to write server side routes and html/js to interact with them.
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- tamimio 3y agoSome people are die hard python fans, trying to use a scripting language for everything. I encountered some where they try to use Python in embedded (robotics to be exact) and oh boy how terrible it was, a “collision avoidance” was taking few seconds to respond..
- PeterStuer 3y agoSome of us just need a simple webform for our project. Keeping all code in Python makes sense. Nearly all generative AI projects with a web frontend on Github use libraries like Streamlit etc. And, while Phyton would not be my preferred choice for robotics, I did write kernels for small 'autonomous' mobile robotics a long time ago in C. The systems ran at 20 hz. I'm pretty confident modern embedded computers running Phyton can achieve 20 hz sense/think/act cycles.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Some people are die hard python fans, trying to use a scripting language for everything. Kind of a weird thing to say when the domain is web frontend where the default (which this wraps) is JS, another “scripting language”, to the extent that label actually means anything (which it mostly doesn’t.)
- bodge5000 3y agoWhy not? Someone has found a way to fit a square peg into a round hole, your round pegs still work the same as they did before, people just have more options now.