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It is 30+ years old with all the baggage you would expect. It’s very much a product of its time.
by datakan 1mo ago
It is 30+ years old with all the baggage you would expect. It’s very much a product of its time.
- 9dev 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo agoJust like C# has baggage. Or R has. Or Go, to some extent. This is a non-sequitur.
- thayne 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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.