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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

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.

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.