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I think in general python gets used because of laziness and vitality. It's just the dumb shit that X person learned first because Y person before then was taug

I think in general python gets used because of laziness and vitality. It's just the dumb shit that X person learned first because Y person before then was taught it because it was easy even though it's maybe not even the right choice for example, you can't properly write a working webserver in python without {venv, uvicorn, celery etc.} and if youve ever worked in another language its like why the hell is this shit here? Because it's viral, someone didn't know better, and it stuck. Same goes for machine learning. The ML folks at the start couldn't be bothered to learn something the least bit sophisticated. Some things are getting better. You don't need conda anymore, tensorflow wheels are out, and at least instead of shippong around .pt, checkpoint, or pickle files at least we use safetensors, but there's still python shit around, like jinja2 templates for conversations, etc. Anyways if we want good things we need to get better about getting unstuck from these local minima.

rich_sasha 2y ago
I disagree re Python. It is a brilliant, flexible scripting language. It is easy to build expressive libraries such as pytest or argparse, with deep introspection. It is easy to prototype by subtly changing return types, or even keeping them flexible. It is really easy to eg build a custom data type and build custom expression trees, such as what ML often needs. It has a number of features (often stemming from the above) that make it a PITA for other applications, even when it would be fairly well suited to them otherwise. What I would give for proper static typing for production Python! Alas, that's not coming, and Rust's occasionally mind boggling borrow checker is there to stay.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  If you feel that way about python, it's really just likely you haven't tried anything else better. And anyways you probably shouldn't be serving a website with a scripting language (php and perl are great examples of why not). You probably shouldn't be deploying ml with a scripting language (maybe training is fine, if you're not doing distributed training). You probably shouldn't have too many core os components in a scripting language lookin at you Ubuntu, you probably shouldn't write a cloud (openstack) using a scripting language. What happened to "right tool for the right job".
  - rich_sasha 2y ago
    I don't think you're getting my point. It's a good scripting language - there may better ones, that's besides my point. And your heuristic is terribly wrong, I have used many languages, scripting and otherwise. My point is, it's great at its niche and good but kind of clunky at other things it ends up used for. At its off-niche applications, it attracts a lot of criticism - like you talking about how it's a bad idea to serve a webpage from a scripting language or productionise ML models. No one complains that C++ is clunky at, dunno, serving websites, simply because it is so ill suited for it that no one ever tries. But Rust is less obviously a bad choice. Still that attracts people who find it clunky when they "just" want to serve a webpage and don't want to deal with the vagaries of borrow checker.

rich_sasha 2y ago

I disagree re Python. It is a brilliant, flexible scripting language. It is easy to build expressive libraries such as pytest or argparse, with deep introspection. It is easy to prototype by subtly changing return types, or even keeping them flexible. It is really easy to eg build a custom data type and build custom expression trees, such as what ML often needs. It has a number of features (often stemming from the above) that make it a PITA for other applications, even when it would be fairly well suited to them otherwise. What I would give for proper static typing for production Python! Alas, that's not coming, and Rust's occasionally mind boggling borrow checker is there to stay.

throwawaymaths 2y ago
If you feel that way about python, it's really just likely you haven't tried anything else better. And anyways you probably shouldn't be serving a website with a scripting language (php and perl are great examples of why not). You probably shouldn't be deploying ml with a scripting language (maybe training is fine, if you're not doing distributed training). You probably shouldn't have too many core os components in a scripting language lookin at you Ubuntu, you probably shouldn't write a cloud (openstack) using a scripting language. What happened to "right tool for the right job".
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  I don't think you're getting my point. It's a good scripting language - there may better ones, that's besides my point. And your heuristic is terribly wrong, I have used many languages, scripting and otherwise. My point is, it's great at its niche and good but kind of clunky at other things it ends up used for. At its off-niche applications, it attracts a lot of criticism - like you talking about how it's a bad idea to serve a webpage from a scripting language or productionise ML models. No one complains that C++ is clunky at, dunno, serving websites, simply because it is so ill suited for it that no one ever tries. But Rust is less obviously a bad choice. Still that attracts people who find it clunky when they "just" want to serve a webpage and don't want to deal with the vagaries of borrow checker.