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"... as a Python programmer, I was the member of an elite cabal of superhuman ultranerds, smarter than those childish Rails/JavaScript/PHP/whatever developers t

"... as a Python programmer, I was the member of an elite cabal of superhuman ultranerds, smarter than those childish Rails/JavaScript/PHP/whatever developers that couldn’t write a bubble sort or comprehend even basic algorithmic complexity, but more in touch with reality than the grey-bearded wizards of Lisp/Haskell/whatever that sat in their caves/towers/whatever solving contrived, nonexistent problems for people that don’t exist, or those insane Erlang programmers who are content writing sumerian cuneiform all day long." This made me laugh, thank you.

IsTom 14y ago
"Everyone less nerdy than me is stupid and everyone more nerdy than my is a no-life". I think it's pathetic, not funny.
- jimbokun 14y ago
  That was the joke.
- jonathansizz 14y ago
  It's actually kind of bizarre that so many Pythonistas actually have the kind of attitude that the article mocks, since Python is a thoroughly mediocre language. I can only attribute their patronizing disposition to a lack of genuine awareness of the broader programming world.
  - Ideka 14y ago
    since Python is a thoroughly mediocre language. Care to elaborate?
    - tikhonj 14y ago
      Is there anything to add? It's not very fast. It does not have any interesting abstraction. It doesn't push the envelope further. It doesn't allow any clever optimizations. It has a bunch of horrible gotchas (scoping, mutable default arguments, tuples of one element...). It isn't elegant--the grammar alone takes pages and it's just a loose collection of mostly orthogonal features with largely arbitrary (but, admittedly, readable) syntax. It is fairly verbose and writing most anything takes more than one line. It pretends to support functional programming, but only grudgingly and never well. It has OO support, but also rather half-heartedly compared to Self or Smalltalk. It has a completely arbitrary and unnecessary delineation between statements and expressions (this one really annoys me). In short, it's a language best define by what it isn't: it isn't bad, but it also isn't good. It isn't particularly elegant, but it isn't particularly ugly either. It isn't exceptionally expressive, but it's also no tarpit. It isn't very concise, but it isn't quite overly verbose. It is the very essence of plainness. If languages had a color, Python's would be a dull gray. An interesting thing to note is which communities do not like Python. For what it's worth, the least Python-endorsing site I've found is Lambda the Ultimate. That should definitely tell you something, although I suspect what it tells you depends entirely on your own preferences :P. Python really is nothing but mediocre and uninspiring. Sure, it isn't bad, but I would like a language that is actively good. The very interesting thing about all this is that, quite often, you need a mediocre language. So Python is actually a great fit for a bunch of startups--it's the modern lowest common denominator. But I--being deeply interested in programming languages--wouldn't want to work anywhere that settled on a language that way.
      - slurgfest 14y ago
        There is no 'horrible gotcha' with tuples of one element. Have you even tried generator expressions? Do you have any specific performance problem, or do you just suppose that you couldn't write sufficiently performant code in Python? Overall, from your post, I don't believe you have used Python seriously. I don't care what color Python would be, nor would I care what ice cream flavor it would be. Nor do I care whether it is cool on Lambda the Ultimate. Is this grade school? If you are looking for a lowest common denominator, I think the language best fitting that description is C. I do not say this to damn C, which I rather like in its way. The core language is relatively simple and portable and is the closest thing that practical programming has to a lingua franca (not talking about academic stuff like ML). If you can't understand why anyone would like C then it isn't at all surprising that you wouldn't understand why someone would like Python. Use whatever you want for yourself, but let's be clear that this is a matter of you being too cool for Python, not of you having any real reason why it is a bad tool.
        tikhonj 14y ago
        For what it's worth, I've used Python professionally and in several classes. I certainly don't have much experience in it, but it would be odd if I did--why would I use a language I don't particularly like too much? You only say there are no horrible gotchas with tuples because you've never spent hours hunting down a bug and finding that you forgot a trailing comma. More pertinently, changing something like ("foo", "bar", "baz") to ("foo") actually breaks the code. This style is used often in configuration scripts (e.g. for Django) and certainly got me before. I don't really see what generator expressions have to do with anything. The performance problem isn't a problem per se--the performance just isn't good. But this does not mean it's bad! That was really the whole point of my post; the performance, like everything else about the language, is unimpressive. In my experience, even naively written Haskell tends to perform better while being shorter and easier to write. My point with Lambda the Ultimate was more general--I've noticed that the more programming language oriented a community is, the less people like Python. The people who spend the most time thinking about and working on different programming languages--the denizens of Lambda the Ultimate--are the ones who like it least. It's very much like music that musicians don't like. What I meant by lowest common denominator is that you could get virtually anybody, regardless of skill level, to use Python. C is far more tricky--and has far more odd edge cases and ways to shoot yourself in the foot--than Python. It trades this for lower-level hardware access and performance, but this makes it far less of a LCD language than Python. This is not a matter of "cool"--and it's not even a matter of Python being a bad tool. It's a matter of Python not being an outstanding, or, honestly, even a good tool. And, as I said, this is perfectly fine; there are plenty of reasons to choose a solid tool you know well over something that may even be strictly superior. I can even understand why people would like this; many people like something approachable and bland over something seemingly exotic but also exciting. But this does not fit with Python's general hype. People trot Python out as the gold standard of language design and are rather proud of themselves (as the post starting this whole discussion parodied) without having the substance to back that attitude up. And all this goes back to the original thesis: Python is not actively bad, but it is also not actively good--it occupies a rather uninteresting middle ground. This is only surprising in light of its somewhat incongruous reputation as one of the best languages in certain circles.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    How many Pythonistas? I would like you to substantiate this claim. I would assume that you actually don't have that much contact with the Python community because otherwise it is pretty unaccountable how I have never encountered that attitude all these years. and I am a grumpy person, and not without my own axes to grind about the Python community.
    - 3amOpsGuy 14y ago
      I can relate to what he said, like the grandparent here it made me laugh. I wouldn't say i espouse the view presented (have too much respect for what's been achieved in the other camps such as Ruby and even PHP), but internally yeah i think i do view the world that way. I don't think it's any different from the common "anyone driving slower than you is a doddler, anyone faster is a maniac" - a patently absurd view to hold. The enlightening part for me is that other pythonistas think this way, because as you said, i have also never experienced this view expressed publicly by the python community.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  I read that quote from the article as essentially self-pardoying. The author is essentially making fun of himself and the general attitude he--and other Pythonistas, I imagine--held. Then again, maybe I'm reading too much into it. For the record, I think Haskell is a strictly superior choice to Go, so I'm what he would probably call "gray-bearded" :P. (And I'm certainly working on a beard, even if it shouldn't be gray any time soon.)
  - zemo 14y ago
    >maybe I'm reading too much into it. no, you got it. It's not really meant to be a criticism of Python itself, it's just behavior that is common among 20-something web developers, which is representative of some areas of the industry, and is specifically the target audience for the post. You know, the kind of developer that is advanced enough that they can build non-trivial projects, but not experienced enough to have wisdom forged in the furnaces of years of industry experience (that's ... me and a lot of other HN users). The same type of attitude can be found in all languages and isn't specific to the Python community; the specific swipes at other languages are just what you get if you apply that attitude to Python. Judging people by the tools they use is a pretty useless metric. >For the record, I think Haskell is a strictly superior choice to Go I'm pretty sure it's the best programming language, that's why I put them in the gray-beard category. Or maybe it's OCaml or some Lisp dialect; it doesn't really matter. It's even why I further apologized to Dons and acknowledged that Haskell programmers tend to be able to solve harder problems than other programmers I know, but even after I twice acknowledged the superiority of Haskell, he basically just looked at me and said "you're a stupid idiot, and by the way, look at how many numbers I can compute with my superior Haskell program that runs on a lot of machines". Uh, ok, that's cool... I guess. But every time I sit down with Haskell programmers and they explain to me how elegant their code is, I just don't really care. It's not what makes me interested in computer programming. I don't really care to use the best programming language; I really only care to make the best programs. PHP (and other shit technologies) have shown us that you don't need to understand monads to make people happy. A friend of mine, who is a very strong programmer that I have a tremendous amount of respect for professionally, once showed me how to use Coq to prove that multiplication is commutative. I found that very boring, and it didn't make me want to learn Coq. Mind you, I spend between 40 and 60 hours a week working with software. I'm in it because I like to build things that are useful to people, and I think software is a great creative medium. I think that's a fairly common attitude. Every time I say the name Haskell I am sorry for it, because every time I say the name Haskell I am met with bitter condescension. It makes me sad that despite talking about having experience with seven programming languages in my post, or mentioning having built a variety of things that are very different, Haskell programmers consistently treat me like I am a stupid person. So I'm glad you're not like that, and I'm glad that you understood I didn't mean to dismiss Haskell on technical grounds. Thank you for your comment.
- mjcohenw 14y ago
  Sounds like a variation on George Carlin's line that everyone who drives slower than me is stupid and everyone who drives faster is crazy.
  - mixmastamyk 14y ago
    Wasn't it asshole/maniac?
    - nobleach 14y ago
      It was idiot/maniac... one of the few times George opted for a repeatable joke to children.
- phaikawl 14y ago
  Just a joke from the author, why so serious, everybody?
- burntsushi 14y ago
  There is apparently something wrong with your ability to detect when something is said in jest.
slurgfest 14y ago
I go to Python conferences and meetups regularly and I cannot say that I have ever run into this attitude, let alone the specific combination. I do run into a lot of egos but these don't seem much different from the types I see posting comments like this on Hacker News. And a lot of Python people have picked up Node or Go these days, so I wouldn't be too sure that you weren't damning a significant part of your own favorite community here.

IsTom 14y ago

"Everyone less nerdy than me is stupid and everyone more nerdy than my is a no-life". I think it's pathetic, not funny.

jimbokun 14y ago
That was the joke.
jonathansizz 14y ago
It's actually kind of bizarre that so many Pythonistas actually have the kind of attitude that the article mocks, since Python is a thoroughly mediocre language. I can only attribute their patronizing disposition to a lack of genuine awareness of the broader programming world.
- Ideka 14y ago
  since Python is a thoroughly mediocre language. Care to elaborate?
  - tikhonj 14y ago
    Is there anything to add? It's not very fast. It does not have any interesting abstraction. It doesn't push the envelope further. It doesn't allow any clever optimizations. It has a bunch of horrible gotchas (scoping, mutable default arguments, tuples of one element...). It isn't elegant--the grammar alone takes pages and it's just a loose collection of mostly orthogonal features with largely arbitrary (but, admittedly, readable) syntax. It is fairly verbose and writing most anything takes more than one line. It pretends to support functional programming, but only grudgingly and never well. It has OO support, but also rather half-heartedly compared to Self or Smalltalk. It has a completely arbitrary and unnecessary delineation between statements and expressions (this one really annoys me). In short, it's a language best define by what it isn't: it isn't bad, but it also isn't good. It isn't particularly elegant, but it isn't particularly ugly either. It isn't exceptionally expressive, but it's also no tarpit. It isn't very concise, but it isn't quite overly verbose. It is the very essence of plainness. If languages had a color, Python's would be a dull gray. An interesting thing to note is which communities do not like Python. For what it's worth, the least Python-endorsing site I've found is Lambda the Ultimate. That should definitely tell you something, although I suspect what it tells you depends entirely on your own preferences :P. Python really is nothing but mediocre and uninspiring. Sure, it isn't bad, but I would like a language that is actively good. The very interesting thing about all this is that, quite often, you need a mediocre language. So Python is actually a great fit for a bunch of startups--it's the modern lowest common denominator. But I--being deeply interested in programming languages--wouldn't want to work anywhere that settled on a language that way.
    - slurgfest 14y ago
      There is no 'horrible gotcha' with tuples of one element. Have you even tried generator expressions? Do you have any specific performance problem, or do you just suppose that you couldn't write sufficiently performant code in Python? Overall, from your post, I don't believe you have used Python seriously. I don't care what color Python would be, nor would I care what ice cream flavor it would be. Nor do I care whether it is cool on Lambda the Ultimate. Is this grade school? If you are looking for a lowest common denominator, I think the language best fitting that description is C. I do not say this to damn C, which I rather like in its way. The core language is relatively simple and portable and is the closest thing that practical programming has to a lingua franca (not talking about academic stuff like ML). If you can't understand why anyone would like C then it isn't at all surprising that you wouldn't understand why someone would like Python. Use whatever you want for yourself, but let's be clear that this is a matter of you being too cool for Python, not of you having any real reason why it is a bad tool.
      - tikhonj 14y ago
        For what it's worth, I've used Python professionally and in several classes. I certainly don't have much experience in it, but it would be odd if I did--why would I use a language I don't particularly like too much? You only say there are no horrible gotchas with tuples because you've never spent hours hunting down a bug and finding that you forgot a trailing comma. More pertinently, changing something like ("foo", "bar", "baz") to ("foo") actually breaks the code. This style is used often in configuration scripts (e.g. for Django) and certainly got me before. I don't really see what generator expressions have to do with anything. The performance problem isn't a problem per se--the performance just isn't good. But this does not mean it's bad! That was really the whole point of my post; the performance, like everything else about the language, is unimpressive. In my experience, even naively written Haskell tends to perform better while being shorter and easier to write. My point with Lambda the Ultimate was more general--I've noticed that the more programming language oriented a community is, the less people like Python. The people who spend the most time thinking about and working on different programming languages--the denizens of Lambda the Ultimate--are the ones who like it least. It's very much like music that musicians don't like. What I meant by lowest common denominator is that you could get virtually anybody, regardless of skill level, to use Python. C is far more tricky--and has far more odd edge cases and ways to shoot yourself in the foot--than Python. It trades this for lower-level hardware access and performance, but this makes it far less of a LCD language than Python. This is not a matter of "cool"--and it's not even a matter of Python being a bad tool. It's a matter of Python not being an outstanding, or, honestly, even a good tool. And, as I said, this is perfectly fine; there are plenty of reasons to choose a solid tool you know well over something that may even be strictly superior. I can even understand why people would like this; many people like something approachable and bland over something seemingly exotic but also exciting. But this does not fit with Python's general hype. People trot Python out as the gold standard of language design and are rather proud of themselves (as the post starting this whole discussion parodied) without having the substance to back that attitude up. And all this goes back to the original thesis: Python is not actively bad, but it is also not actively good--it occupies a rather uninteresting middle ground. This is only surprising in light of its somewhat incongruous reputation as one of the best languages in certain circles.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  How many Pythonistas? I would like you to substantiate this claim. I would assume that you actually don't have that much contact with the Python community because otherwise it is pretty unaccountable how I have never encountered that attitude all these years. and I am a grumpy person, and not without my own axes to grind about the Python community.
  - 3amOpsGuy 14y ago
    I can relate to what he said, like the grandparent here it made me laugh. I wouldn't say i espouse the view presented (have too much respect for what's been achieved in the other camps such as Ruby and even PHP), but internally yeah i think i do view the world that way. I don't think it's any different from the common "anyone driving slower than you is a doddler, anyone faster is a maniac" - a patently absurd view to hold. The enlightening part for me is that other pythonistas think this way, because as you said, i have also never experienced this view expressed publicly by the python community.
tikhonj 14y ago
I read that quote from the article as essentially self-pardoying. The author is essentially making fun of himself and the general attitude he--and other Pythonistas, I imagine--held. Then again, maybe I'm reading too much into it. For the record, I think Haskell is a strictly superior choice to Go, so I'm what he would probably call "gray-bearded" :P. (And I'm certainly working on a beard, even if it shouldn't be gray any time soon.)
- zemo 14y ago
  >maybe I'm reading too much into it. no, you got it. It's not really meant to be a criticism of Python itself, it's just behavior that is common among 20-something web developers, which is representative of some areas of the industry, and is specifically the target audience for the post. You know, the kind of developer that is advanced enough that they can build non-trivial projects, but not experienced enough to have wisdom forged in the furnaces of years of industry experience (that's ... me and a lot of other HN users). The same type of attitude can be found in all languages and isn't specific to the Python community; the specific swipes at other languages are just what you get if you apply that attitude to Python. Judging people by the tools they use is a pretty useless metric. >For the record, I think Haskell is a strictly superior choice to Go I'm pretty sure it's the best programming language, that's why I put them in the gray-beard category. Or maybe it's OCaml or some Lisp dialect; it doesn't really matter. It's even why I further apologized to Dons and acknowledged that Haskell programmers tend to be able to solve harder problems than other programmers I know, but even after I twice acknowledged the superiority of Haskell, he basically just looked at me and said "you're a stupid idiot, and by the way, look at how many numbers I can compute with my superior Haskell program that runs on a lot of machines". Uh, ok, that's cool... I guess. But every time I sit down with Haskell programmers and they explain to me how elegant their code is, I just don't really care. It's not what makes me interested in computer programming. I don't really care to use the best programming language; I really only care to make the best programs. PHP (and other shit technologies) have shown us that you don't need to understand monads to make people happy. A friend of mine, who is a very strong programmer that I have a tremendous amount of respect for professionally, once showed me how to use Coq to prove that multiplication is commutative. I found that very boring, and it didn't make me want to learn Coq. Mind you, I spend between 40 and 60 hours a week working with software. I'm in it because I like to build things that are useful to people, and I think software is a great creative medium. I think that's a fairly common attitude. Every time I say the name Haskell I am sorry for it, because every time I say the name Haskell I am met with bitter condescension. It makes me sad that despite talking about having experience with seven programming languages in my post, or mentioning having built a variety of things that are very different, Haskell programmers consistently treat me like I am a stupid person. So I'm glad you're not like that, and I'm glad that you understood I didn't mean to dismiss Haskell on technical grounds. Thank you for your comment.
mjcohenw 14y ago
Sounds like a variation on George Carlin's line that everyone who drives slower than me is stupid and everyone who drives faster is crazy.
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  Wasn't it asshole/maniac?
  - nobleach 14y ago
    It was idiot/maniac... one of the few times George opted for a repeatable joke to children.
phaikawl 14y ago
Just a joke from the author, why so serious, everybody?
burntsushi 14y ago
There is apparently something wrong with your ability to detect when something is said in jest.

slurgfest 14y ago

I go to Python conferences and meetups regularly and I cannot say that I have ever run into this attitude, let alone the specific combination. I do run into a lot of egos but these don't seem much different from the types I see posting comments like this on Hacker News. And a lot of Python people have picked up Node or Go these days, so I wouldn't be too sure that you weren't damning a significant part of your own favorite community here.