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This is a fairly weak article, full of deflections around the real weaknesses of python. I'm surprised it is on the Paypal Engineering blog. Like all languages

This is a fairly weak article, full of deflections around the real weaknesses of python. I'm surprised it is on the Paypal Engineering blog. Like all languages, Python has strengths and weaknesses, and there is no shame in that. An honest article would address the negatives head on, acknowledge them as potential negatives,(not skip around them) and provide alternatives, . The strawman "Python has a weak type system" is a good example of such deflection. No one (who understands type systems) would complain that "Python has a weak type system" A more common "criticism" would be "Python does not have a static type system, which is handy for large codebases worked on by large teams". Address that upfront, and you have a decent article. This is just a fanboy (who just happens to be at Paypal) praising his favorite language and ignoring its weaknesses.

dvanduzer 12y ago
The keyword here is "Enterprise" Python. The Enterprise is a place where you have "decision makers" which are often people who don't understand type systems, and have absolutely no incentive to do so. Paypal is a large organization which needs to hire Python programmers. Everyone reading this now has a reminder that Python is popular at Paypal. We also know that endless PLT arguments are probably not common in the workplace.
- mietek 12y ago
  Fortunately, there are other large organisations employing decision-makers which understand the business value of type systems. Apple: https://developer.apple.com/swift https://developer.apple.com/swift Facebook: http://flowtype.org http://flowtype.org + http://hacklang.org http://hacklang.org + http://hhvm.com http://hhvm.com Microsoft: http://fsharp.org http://fsharp.org + https://haskell.org https://haskell.org + http://typescriptlang.org http://typescriptlang.org Mozilla: http://rust-lang.org http://rust-lang.org Google: The jury is out on this one.
  - russell_h 12y ago
    Can you clarify what you mean about Google?
    - MHordecki 12y ago
      Most likely a quip about how Go's type system is uninspiring.
      - jhawk28 12y ago
        Ironically, Go being uninspiring is its greatest strength.
    - mietek 12y ago
      For one, both Dart and Go repeat Hoare’s Billion Dollar Mistake, by admitting null references instead of implementing option types. In a previous HN discussion, I wrote to one of the Go designers: > I disagree with you on the relative complexity of type systems, and, as someone passionate about my craft, I despair Go is merely good not great, due to what appears to be uninformed design decisions. > You may prefer to write in Go, but you don't work in a vacuum. Your creation is out there, gaining mindshare, and propagating mistakes made half a century ago. As a language designer, you have the power to shape human thought for years to come, and the responsibility to remain intellectually honest. This is the meaning of Hoare's apology. He didn't know better. You have no such excuse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822545
      - winter_blue 12y ago
        Well said. Your comment on that link was quite insightful as well. I'll quote it here below: "So, Go has message passing. Just like Erlang, since 1986. Only without per-process heaps, which make crashing processes safe. And without process linking and supervision, which helps systems built using Erlang/OTP achieve nine nines of uptime. Instead, it includes null references, also known as Hoare's Billion Dollar Mistake. But it's not enough to scorn the industry; Go's designers also look down their noses at academia. A modern, ML-derived static type system? Generics, which would enable the unwashed mashes to write their own `append`? Ain't nobody got time for that — wait, what? Oh, Rust does? Go's tooling is fantastic, and its pragmatism is commendable, but ignoring the last 30 years of programming language research is not."
  - scorpion032 12y ago
    Google, Apple, Facebook are the tech companies. Even though they are enterprises, the term enterprise software often refer to the other companies, who use tech as an aid to run their main businesses. Think about Box, MobileIron, and many such companies targeted to enterprises and who their consumers are. That is the enterprise software market.
TorKlingberg 12y ago
Or the criticisms of Python that he has encountered are just different from your criticisms. I have not seen anyone complain that Python is not compiled for at least a decade, but maybe the author has.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  I always read "not compiled" as a synonym for "slow." I'm not worried about Python's type system. At worst it's manageable, at best it's expressive for prototyping. But when I see benchmarks that suggest Python is 10 to 100X slower for critical server code, I have to wonder why anyone would use it for enterprise development. Which is why there are so many Java and C++ code jockeys working in enterprise. Neither language is pretty or fun or interesting from a CS point of view. But there's no arguing both consistently run faster than anything this side of assembler. I would have expected critical industrial infrastructure code to pay some attention to that - because speed isn't an abstraction. When you're running giant data centres, extra cycles consistently cost real money. Dev costs are relatively small compared to operating costs. So it's well worth spending extra time getting good, fast compiled code working.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    >But when I see benchmarks that suggest Python is 10 to 100X slower for critical server code, I have to wonder why anyone would use it for enterprise development. Because CPU cycles are cheap and bugs are not. >Dev costs are relatively small compared to operating costs. Uhh, not in my experience.
    - aetherson 12y ago
      It really just depends on the project. Sometimes, all you want to do is, like, take data, type-check it, maybe do a couple of simple transforms, and then store it. But you want to do it 50,000 times per second. In that case, it may very well be the case that ops costs absolutely dwarf dev costs. Similarly, it may be that what you want is to take data and run it through super-complicated algorithms depending on a lot of business data, and massage it all over the place... but you only need to do this 10 times per second. In which case your dev costs may absolutely dwarf your ops costs.
Dewie 12y ago
Some people - who do understand type systems - only think of static type systems as type systems. And in that regard they might look at "dynamically typed langauges" as having "weak type systems", since they are often just unityped (only have one type).
- mietek 12y ago
  Unfortunately, the words “strong” and “weak” often don’t mean anything more than: > Strong typing: A type system that I like and feel comfortable with > Weak typing: A type system that worries me, or makes me feel uncomfortable http://web.archive.org/web/20091227121956/http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html http://web.archive.org/web/20091227121956/http://www.pphsg.o...
  - Dewie 12y ago
    I agree to a degree, though some things are at least confined to a certain dimensions: like strong/weak typing. A continuum more than a binary distinction, but at least you can say things like "stronger" and "weaker" than something else. (Note that I wrote "weak type system", not "weak typing". "Weak" here is a just a generic adjective, and not meant to be precise.)

dvanduzer 12y ago

The keyword here is "Enterprise" Python. The Enterprise is a place where you have "decision makers" which are often people who don't understand type systems, and have absolutely no incentive to do so. Paypal is a large organization which needs to hire Python programmers. Everyone reading this now has a reminder that Python is popular at Paypal. We also know that endless PLT arguments are probably not common in the workplace.

mietek 12y ago
Fortunately, there are other large organisations employing decision-makers which understand the business value of type systems. Apple: https://developer.apple.com/swift https://developer.apple.com/swift Facebook: http://flowtype.org http://flowtype.org + http://hacklang.org http://hacklang.org + http://hhvm.com http://hhvm.com Microsoft: http://fsharp.org http://fsharp.org + https://haskell.org https://haskell.org + http://typescriptlang.org http://typescriptlang.org Mozilla: http://rust-lang.org http://rust-lang.org Google: The jury is out on this one.
- russell_h 12y ago
  Can you clarify what you mean about Google?
  - MHordecki 12y ago
    Most likely a quip about how Go's type system is uninspiring.
    - jhawk28 12y ago
      Ironically, Go being uninspiring is its greatest strength.
  - mietek 12y ago
    For one, both Dart and Go repeat Hoare’s Billion Dollar Mistake, by admitting null references instead of implementing option types. In a previous HN discussion, I wrote to one of the Go designers: > I disagree with you on the relative complexity of type systems, and, as someone passionate about my craft, I despair Go is merely good not great, due to what appears to be uninformed design decisions. > You may prefer to write in Go, but you don't work in a vacuum. Your creation is out there, gaining mindshare, and propagating mistakes made half a century ago. As a language designer, you have the power to shape human thought for years to come, and the responsibility to remain intellectually honest. This is the meaning of Hoare's apology. He didn't know better. You have no such excuse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822545
    - winter_blue 12y ago
      Well said. Your comment on that link was quite insightful as well. I'll quote it here below: "So, Go has message passing. Just like Erlang, since 1986. Only without per-process heaps, which make crashing processes safe. And without process linking and supervision, which helps systems built using Erlang/OTP achieve nine nines of uptime. Instead, it includes null references, also known as Hoare's Billion Dollar Mistake. But it's not enough to scorn the industry; Go's designers also look down their noses at academia. A modern, ML-derived static type system? Generics, which would enable the unwashed mashes to write their own `append`? Ain't nobody got time for that — wait, what? Oh, Rust does? Go's tooling is fantastic, and its pragmatism is commendable, but ignoring the last 30 years of programming language research is not."
- scorpion032 12y ago
  Google, Apple, Facebook are the tech companies. Even though they are enterprises, the term enterprise software often refer to the other companies, who use tech as an aid to run their main businesses. Think about Box, MobileIron, and many such companies targeted to enterprises and who their consumers are. That is the enterprise software market.

TorKlingberg 12y ago

Or the criticisms of Python that he has encountered are just different from your criticisms. I have not seen anyone complain that Python is not compiled for at least a decade, but maybe the author has.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
I always read "not compiled" as a synonym for "slow." I'm not worried about Python's type system. At worst it's manageable, at best it's expressive for prototyping. But when I see benchmarks that suggest Python is 10 to 100X slower for critical server code, I have to wonder why anyone would use it for enterprise development. Which is why there are so many Java and C++ code jockeys working in enterprise. Neither language is pretty or fun or interesting from a CS point of view. But there's no arguing both consistently run faster than anything this side of assembler. I would have expected critical industrial infrastructure code to pay some attention to that - because speed isn't an abstraction. When you're running giant data centres, extra cycles consistently cost real money. Dev costs are relatively small compared to operating costs. So it's well worth spending extra time getting good, fast compiled code working.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >But when I see benchmarks that suggest Python is 10 to 100X slower for critical server code, I have to wonder why anyone would use it for enterprise development. Because CPU cycles are cheap and bugs are not. >Dev costs are relatively small compared to operating costs. Uhh, not in my experience.
  - aetherson 12y ago
    It really just depends on the project. Sometimes, all you want to do is, like, take data, type-check it, maybe do a couple of simple transforms, and then store it. But you want to do it 50,000 times per second. In that case, it may very well be the case that ops costs absolutely dwarf dev costs. Similarly, it may be that what you want is to take data and run it through super-complicated algorithms depending on a lot of business data, and massage it all over the place... but you only need to do this 10 times per second. In which case your dev costs may absolutely dwarf your ops costs.

Dewie 12y ago

Some people - who do understand type systems - only think of static type systems as type systems. And in that regard they might look at "dynamically typed langauges" as having "weak type systems", since they are often just unityped (only have one type).

mietek 12y ago
Unfortunately, the words “strong” and “weak” often don’t mean anything more than: > Strong typing: A type system that I like and feel comfortable with > Weak typing: A type system that worries me, or makes me feel uncomfortable http://web.archive.org/web/20091227121956/http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html http://web.archive.org/web/20091227121956/http://www.pphsg.o...
- Dewie 12y ago
  I agree to a degree, though some things are at least confined to a certain dimensions: like strong/weak typing. A continuum more than a binary distinction, but at least you can say things like "stronger" and "weaker" than something else. (Note that I wrote "weak type system", not "weak typing". "Weak" here is a just a generic adjective, and not meant to be precise.)