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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 jus

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.
- alexanderh 14y ago
  I like how after all these paragraphs you've managed to avoid having to offer up your own personal example of a "good" and "outstanding" language. But have no problem labeling other languages as NOT being such, with very poor examples :P You should get an achievement of some sort. Hackernews needs achievements.
  - skrebbel 14y ago
    Why were the examples poor? Also, if he'd have "Python is mediocre, and X is fantastic", the discussion would've moved to X. He was right in not doing that. And why the bitterness?
- antihero 14y ago
  Doing that makes it not a tuple but just a string that's in brackets. Anybody that's done Python for more than a day will instantly know that you'd do ("foo",), and to be honest you'd more likely write it as ( "foo", "bar", "baz", ) So removing the last two elements will not break the tuple.
- tompudding 14y ago
  People who like programming languages are not the intended users. People who like programming are, and in my experience there is rather less overlap between these two groups than you might think.
- icebraining 14y ago
  I don't get your tuple example. If you don't use the tuple operator - the comma - why would you expect to get a tuple? People trot Python out as the gold standard of language design Who?
  - emmelaich 14y ago
    > I don't get your tuple example ... The point is that it's a subtle syntactical difference but a dramatic semantic difference. I think most newcomers to Python hit this.

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.

alexanderh 14y ago
I like how after all these paragraphs you've managed to avoid having to offer up your own personal example of a "good" and "outstanding" language. But have no problem labeling other languages as NOT being such, with very poor examples :P You should get an achievement of some sort. Hackernews needs achievements.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  Why were the examples poor? Also, if he'd have "Python is mediocre, and X is fantastic", the discussion would've moved to X. He was right in not doing that. And why the bitterness?
antihero 14y ago
Doing that makes it not a tuple but just a string that's in brackets. Anybody that's done Python for more than a day will instantly know that you'd do ("foo",), and to be honest you'd more likely write it as ( "foo", "bar", "baz", ) So removing the last two elements will not break the tuple.
tompudding 14y ago
People who like programming languages are not the intended users. People who like programming are, and in my experience there is rather less overlap between these two groups than you might think.
icebraining 14y ago
I don't get your tuple example. If you don't use the tuple operator - the comma - why would you expect to get a tuple? People trot Python out as the gold standard of language design Who?
- emmelaich 14y ago
  > I don't get your tuple example ... The point is that it's a subtle syntactical difference but a dramatic semantic difference. I think most newcomers to Python hit this.