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Comment by fokinsean | Hacker News Reader

That's a lame reason to not use Python

Here's better ones:

1) Did they fix the thing where you had to use __self__ practically everywhere? Double underscored variable names also look like crap, especially when they're everywhere. It looks like a really shitty design flaw, having to use __self__ this and __self__ that everywhere. (This situation may have been ameliorated since I last looked at the language.)

2) Not everyone likes significant whitespace. But moreover...

3) If you code for long enough, you'll eventually realize that Ruby, Python, C++, etc. etc. are all fundamentally flawed due to OO making it too easy to write spaghetti-dependency code with mutable state everywhere, which means EVERY OO CODEBASE NO MATTER WHAT eventually becomes an unmanageable bugridden long-test-runtime complexity tarpit.

They should stop calling it "technical debt" and start calling it "object-oriented debt" ;)

So you eventually convert to the Functional Programming™ religion. ;) And that is the real reason not to use Python (or Ruby or Java or C), IMHO. But don't take my word for it, here's John Carmack basically saying that everyone should use functional paradigms (even in OO languages) if at all humanly possible: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_pro...

You should probably be careful there -- shared mutable state is the problem, and as Rust demonstrates, attacking the "shared" part can be just as effective (if not more so) than attacking the "mutable" part.

Both come with tradeoffs, but Rust's borrow checker seems, anecdotally, to be easier for people to understand than the category-theory word salad that litters most strictly-immutable FP language discussions.

I have seen showstopper, up-all-night bugs with BOTH shared mutable state (see: the reason it is nearly impossible to reduce a certain Rails app's test suite runtime below about a half hour without significant rewriting) AND single threaded mutability bugs (in one case resulting in me taking a month to fix a login bug that nobody else at the company was able to find out in over a year... It was a hash mutation deep inside a middleware affecting auth cookies)

A simple example of a single threaded mutability bug is passing an object by reference to a method which then (either intentionally or unintentionally) mutates the object, to the complete ignorance of the caller up in the call stack. The only thing stopping that is literally, programmer skill. No language constructs. At least in all the OO langs I ever worked with.

You really should try out Rust. The scenario you describe would not compile in Rust.

I have been meaning to. I hope great things come of it.

Most Python code does not involve the creation of classes, so I think you're wrong to associate it with true OO message-passing languages such as Ruby and Java.

It's self, not __self__ (it has never been __self__). Double underscore names are used for special methods, which are typed relatively rarely, the most common probably being __init__.

1) __self__? I don't think I have ever seen that. Are you combining two problems? All metamethods are quoted with dunderscores, and the first parameter of each method is "self", both of which annoy some people...

2) That is a reasonable choice. I like expressing myself once, instead of repeating myself in both whitespace and brackets or whatever, but I get the argument for autoformatting after copy/paste. Of course, lua does this the best, by having neither significant whitespace nor semicolons, and just figuring out where statements end from the grammar.

3) Objects are wholly optional, and can mostly be avoided. the functools and itertools libraries go a long way to bring the functional religion to python.

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