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I used to like Python in the 2010s when it felt like a breath of fresh air relative to PHP and Perl. Now it feels like a weird PHP itself that is slow, brittle
by echelon 2mo ago
I used to like Python in the 2010s when it felt like a breath of fresh air relative to PHP and Perl.
Now it feels like a weird PHP itself that is slow, brittle, and dangerous to write code at scale in.
The loose typing, potluck standard library, and horrible package manager (insofar as the community does not know how to package code) all feel so dated.
- datakan 2mo agoIt is 30+ years old with all the baggage you would expect. It’s very much a product of its time.
- 9dev 2mo agoIt’s not like that cannot be changed. Look at PHP, which managed to evolve brilliantly over the last decade and gets tons of things right now.
- snitty 2mo agoI keep on hearing people be excited about PHP. Having first attempted to use PHP in early 00s, I simply cannot bring myself to attempt it again. I once had to rewrite large chunks of a site because it simply couldn't deal with the fact that a string had an apostrophe in it.
- 9dev 2mo agoI can only recommend to check out a popular project, maybe Laravel, and read it’s documentation. Alternatively, look at the PHP website itself. The new syntax improvements alone are pretty convincing IMHO, but the engine also got a JIT compiler, a runtime type system that’s fully opt-in, fibers for concurrency, and much more. It’s really worth a second look.
- thayne 2mo agoPHP has evolved a lot, but it also still has a lot of cruft from its earlier days. And it has made breaking changes on a scale python probably couldn't get away with.
- 9dev 2mo agoShow me a language that old without lots of cruft. The worst thing you can find is the standard library, which is just an unsolvable problem.
- thayne 2mo agoThat's my point. PHP is still an old language with lots of "baggage", just like python is an old language with lots of "baggage".
- 9dev 2mo agoJust like C# has baggage. Or R has. Or Go, to some extent. This is a non-sequitur.
- thayne 2mo agoI don't disagree with any of that. The context for my comment was (paraphrased): GP: python has baggage because it is old P: that can be changed. Look at PHP Me: PHP still has baggage, despite its evolution. You can't really get rid of it without making major breaking changes.
- randallsquared 2mo agoPython 3(000) was an opportunity to fix all the things, so in a sense, the modern Python is less than 20 years old.
- zahlman 2mo agoThey didn't fix nearly enough, and then everyone complained about too much being fixed, and acted like twelve years wasn't enough time to adapt.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- KK7NIL 2mo agoPython certainly has some baggage, especially the typing system (which is still not finished, if you're looking at static typing and so is implemented differently by type checkers) and pip's safety, or lack thereof. But comparing it to PHP or Perl is rhetoric leading you one step too far.
- fugigigjfn 2mo agoComparing it with PHP is unfair… to PHP. The amount of hard work that the PHP community has done to advance and keep their language relevant is impressive and admirable, and Python is perhaps the most extreme counterexample there is. The Python community has spent the last 15 years refusing to improve in any meaningful way, or to learn anything from their peers. As someone who used to choose only jobs that would let me work with Python, I’ve gone through every phase of grief, and now just try to forget that it exists.
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoLol, Python has had incredible improvements over the last decade plus, while uv fixed packaging. It's the best/comprehensive glue language ever made, even with a few remaining warts.
- rmunn 2mo agoMost of the time downvoters don't explain their downvote, but I'll explain mine. I voted this comment down because it's just plain incorrect.I worked with PHP for nearly ten years (and I never want to go back). Maybe PHP has improved since I worked with it (PHP 7.4 was the most recent version when I last worked with it, I have never used PHP 8), but I doubt it. But to describe the Python community as "spen[ding] the last 15 years refusing to improve in any meaningful way" is just laughably wrong. I can't give details as I haven't been doing much Python work, but even so I know of multiple changes, such as the typing system, or packaging improvements, which have significantly improved the language AFAICT. If there's a reason why you would not consider those to be "improv[ing] in any meaningful way", please enlighten me.
- 2mo ago
- adamddev1 2mo agoI don't understand how people talk about how Python is "easy to learn for beginners" or "easy to understand." To me it's so hard to remember and follow all the weirdness. Racket / Scheme / I dare say even Haskell would just be so much simpler for learners. I'm with Conal Elliot when he said on Type Theory for All that it is sooo much harder to understand a program in Python.
- quadrifoliate 2mo ago> Racket / Scheme / I dare say even Haskell would just be so much simpler for learners. I have used all three languages; and you clearly have no idea of the notion of usability of a language. So many things contradict this, let me list them off the top of my head - Getting a running toolchain working: Prexisting (most OSes bundle a Python interpreter) or a package install away for Python. Scheme / Racket is some odd mix of custom IDEs with Dr. in the name, or someone's 20 page essay on how SLIME is the best thing ever. Haskell gets into odd stuff with ghci, cabal, and stack, and all of them are extremely slow. - Tutorials: Python has a ton of them, they all get you printing to stdout and calculating things in about 10 minutes. Scheme / Racket typically spends multiple chapters navel-gazing about lists, cons, and such. Haskell is actually better in terms of the Hello World stuff, but ghci v/s ghc bites you again; and no one has a clear idea of which one to use. - Advanced concepts: Python has mainstream but halfhearted OOP; and things like decorators and metaprogramming. Quickly intelligible if you learned something else like Java or C++. Or if you learned shell scripts you can get quite a bit done with just imperative. Racket/Scheme: 3 chapters in and you're still trying to figure out tail recursion. Haskell: Instead of just doing fun things with take and foldl you're being hit with trivia about typeclasses.
- fn-mote 2mo ago> Quickly intelligible if you learned something else like Java or C++ You’re replying to a post making assertions about beginners. That doesn’t usually mean people with 4 years programming experience picking up a new language. Racket: criticizing for having a beginner-friendly IDE doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s always Magic Racket for VSCode for the others. I guess you’re not starting people with “How to Design Programs” because that’s pictures and animations for ages. Haskell: that was funny but an absurd criticism ghc vs ghci?? Nobody has that problem. The other stuff - valid but lead with it instead of trolling.
- slopinthebag 2mo agoWho cares tho. The agents deal with all of that, if you’re still looking at the code or caring about anything other than the loops and orbs you’re at the wrong level of abstraction. The important thing is the models have tons of python in their training data.
- SCUSKU 2mo agoI've heard of orbs but what is it actually?
- slopinthebag 2mo agoIt’s basically self-contained cloud agents. I’m not sure why they’re called that but I think it’s just the next grift, kinda like “loops”…
- irishcoffee 2mo agoI feel the same way. It was, back then “the second best language for everything, the first best at nothing” Can’t take credit for the quote, read it somewhere. The whole language changed when they kicked what’s-his-name out, and it’s a tool I almost never reach for anymore, whereas 15 years ago it was my Swiss Army knife.
- plant-ian 2mo agoI felt the same way about moving to Python versus PHP and Perl. I still really enjoy using python though. It's not really a fair comparison because I hadn't used PHP and Perl for as long but I just don't hit some mystifying issue every single session like I did with those languages when I'm using python. I honestly have never even read about that __debug__ constant. It's fun to hear about it but it's just not something that's comes up much.
- wredcoll 2mo agoPerl is a lot like that also, you can read about some really weird old features like $[ but you never see that in practice, you just write code with variables and functions and so on.