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My own opinion is that Python shall remain Python, and golang, Rust and Typescript each should be whichever they are with their unique philosophy and design. I

by tzury 2y ago

My own opinion is that Python shall remain Python, and golang, Rust and Typescript each should be whichever they are with their unique philosophy and design. I am coding in all 4, with some roughly 28 years now, and I don't like what is becoming of Python There is a reason why python become that popular and widely adapted and used, and it is not the extra layers of type checking, annotations and the likes. this looks familiar to me, but from other languages. response := get_user_input() I am aware of the factI am in minority, and not trying to change anyone's mind, simply what this voice to be heard from time to time. All in all, a very comprehensive list of some of the recent introduced features. There is an older list on SO which readers might also find useful: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/101268/hidden-features-of-python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/101268/hidden-features-o...

edwardjxli 2y ago
Extra stuff like type checking and annotations are definitely not the reason why python became that popular and widely adapted and used, but it certainly doesn't hurt to add and use them. To be clear, I'm not expecting people to start adding generics to their quick hacked together Python scripts (in fact please don't do that). Instead, if you're building a library or maintaining a larger Python codebase, a lot of these start becoming very useful. A lot of the typing features I mentioned are already used by Python under the hood, and that a lot of Python developers just take for granted. Case in point, the python-opencv (https://github.com/opencv/opencv-python https://github.com/opencv/opencv-python) library has basically no types and it's an absolute pain to work with. BTW thats a really good SO thread, thanks for linking it!
abirch 2y ago
I love Guido's balance. You don't need type checking and annotations if you don't want to use them. They are nice when you're playing in more complex systems, however, completely optional.
mjr00 2y ago
> There is a reason why python become that popular and widely adapted and used, and it is not the extra layers of type checking, annotations and the likes. Python got popular and widely adopted for the same reason PHP did: 1) it was readily available everywhere and 2) it's an easy language for beginners to pick up and get real applications working quickly. But it turns out that the language features desirable for a quick prototype done by your fresh-out-of-college founding engineer aren't the same as the language features desirable for your team of 100 engineers trying to work together on the same codebase. Python is at an odd intersection where it's used by everything from large teams building robust backend applications (particularly in the data/ML space), to data scientists hacking on scripts interactively in Jupyter, to ops people writing deployment scripts. You don't need type checking and annotations if you're writing a few one-off scripts, but you'd be crazy to not take advantage of them for a larger application.
kayo_20211030 2y ago
A very good piece, that I enjoyed. But, I do get the impression that many of these more esoteric features, when reading a code-base, actually end up obscuring the developer's intention, and impair understanding. Without very competent IDE tooling, trying to work out what's happening in a piece of code is extremely difficult. It's turtles all the way down, and there's a lot more turtles now. A number of the new features, appreciated by many for good reason, tend to work against the Zen of Python which at some level explained the meteoric rise of Python as a bona fide implementation language over the last 30 years - simple, obvious, effective and practical.
froh 2y ago
please help me understand. Up to now python emphasizes to be and remain the dynamically typed monkey patch happy core language it is, with the completely volunteer option to provide type hints and use them to your advantage as you see fit. So you can hack away and monkey patch to your heart's content and nothing is taken from you. no rust borrow checker. no need to use a type checker. ducks everywhere. and I'm not aware of features that have to be used, aka incompatible changes to the core language. So what is the critique, exactly?
mardifoufs 2y ago
I mean it's completely optional. Even if you are to use python as a glue language, with absolutely 0 typing annotations on your side, it's still very very useful to have them in the libraries that you inevitably end up using with python. It's not even like it requires an additional build step, so it's really just free.
rkangel 2y ago
I have used Python for a long time for glue scripts, build stuff, test systems etc. and I've always thought it was great. I didn't like using it for larger applications though - when I did, I usually got bitten at some point by some effect of the dynamism (regardless of testing). At scale things became more unworkable. With the type system my opinion on that has changed. We have a pretty large tooling codebase with protocol stacks, GUI, test automation etc. and it's all very maintainable with the type checking.

by tzury 2y ago

edwardjxli 2y ago

Extra stuff like type checking and annotations are definitely not the reason why python became that popular and widely adapted and used, but it certainly doesn't hurt to add and use them. To be clear, I'm not expecting people to start adding generics to their quick hacked together Python scripts (in fact please don't do that). Instead, if you're building a library or maintaining a larger Python codebase, a lot of these start becoming very useful. A lot of the typing features I mentioned are already used by Python under the hood, and that a lot of Python developers just take for granted. Case in point, the python-opencv (https://github.com/opencv/opencv-python https://github.com/opencv/opencv-python) library has basically no types and it's an absolute pain to work with. BTW thats a really good SO thread, thanks for linking it!

abirch 2y ago

I love Guido's balance. You don't need type checking and annotations if you don't want to use them. They are nice when you're playing in more complex systems, however, completely optional.

mjr00 2y ago

> There is a reason why python become that popular and widely adapted and used, and it is not the extra layers of type checking, annotations and the likes. Python got popular and widely adopted for the same reason PHP did: 1) it was readily available everywhere and 2) it's an easy language for beginners to pick up and get real applications working quickly. But it turns out that the language features desirable for a quick prototype done by your fresh-out-of-college founding engineer aren't the same as the language features desirable for your team of 100 engineers trying to work together on the same codebase. Python is at an odd intersection where it's used by everything from large teams building robust backend applications (particularly in the data/ML space), to data scientists hacking on scripts interactively in Jupyter, to ops people writing deployment scripts. You don't need type checking and annotations if you're writing a few one-off scripts, but you'd be crazy to not take advantage of them for a larger application.

kayo_20211030 2y ago

A very good piece, that I enjoyed. But, I do get the impression that many of these more esoteric features, when reading a code-base, actually end up obscuring the developer's intention, and impair understanding. Without very competent IDE tooling, trying to work out what's happening in a piece of code is extremely difficult. It's turtles all the way down, and there's a lot more turtles now. A number of the new features, appreciated by many for good reason, tend to work against the Zen of Python which at some level explained the meteoric rise of Python as a bona fide implementation language over the last 30 years - simple, obvious, effective and practical.

froh 2y ago

please help me understand. Up to now python emphasizes to be and remain the dynamically typed monkey patch happy core language it is, with the completely volunteer option to provide type hints and use them to your advantage as you see fit. So you can hack away and monkey patch to your heart's content and nothing is taken from you. no rust borrow checker. no need to use a type checker. ducks everywhere. and I'm not aware of features that have to be used, aka incompatible changes to the core language. So what is the critique, exactly?

mardifoufs 2y ago

I mean it's completely optional. Even if you are to use python as a glue language, with absolutely 0 typing annotations on your side, it's still very very useful to have them in the libraries that you inevitably end up using with python. It's not even like it requires an additional build step, so it's really just free.

rkangel 2y ago

I have used Python for a long time for glue scripts, build stuff, test systems etc. and I've always thought it was great. I didn't like using it for larger applications though - when I did, I usually got bitten at some point by some effect of the dynamism (regardless of testing). At scale things became more unworkable. With the type system my opinion on that has changed. We have a pretty large tooling codebase with protocol stacks, GUI, test automation etc. and it's all very maintainable with the type checking.