Hacker News Reader

Comment by dunpeal | Hacker News Reader

What are these "stupidities" that bother you?

Personally, I use Python a lot for anything related to data science. No language is perfect, but I'd say Python has a lot less deficiencies and warts than most other mainstream languages, and it's extremely well suited for tasks in data science and related fields such as machine learning.

The main issue with Python is that its default platform (CPython) isn't very efficient. That's not a problem in the language itself; in fact, it's partly caused by all the benefits of a high-level language: you simply don't have the same facilities to optimize your resource consumption as you do in, say, Rust.

The upside is of course that the code is far more concise and readable.

View on HN

Whilst that is true, for data science related things I end up using Pandas (and Numpy) often which are fast.

So most of the heavy lifting is not done by python itself.

Yes, that's the case for most data scientists, and often for users in general. You can get pretty good performance levels from Python by delegating to C correctly. Even end users tend to do that because the data science stack of Python (numpy and the many libraries using it) spend almost all of their runtime in C routines.

If you are using Numpy correctly (even with little understanding of Python itself and its C-API) then virtually all your hot loops are executed in optimal C code.

So what? Pandas and numpy are still use with Python code using their APIs. The implementation details are not something the users care about. They write Python.

Not sure what you're arguing. If you use numpy and pandas properly, most of your computations happen in optimized C routines.

So you will write Python, but get very good resource (both time and space) efficiency.

Here's a classic:

    def a(arg = []):
      return arg
    
    a([1])        #==> [1]
    arr = a()     #==> []
    arr.append(1)
    a()           #==> [1]

That's slightly surprising, but I wouldn't call it a wart. A proper wart is something that bothers you even after years of using the language, not something that surprises you a couple of times as a beginner, but then ceases to be a problem - or indeed, in this case, has some good uses.

The obvious alternative in this case would be to reconstruct the default value. This doesn't work very well with the language's evaluation model - since the function definition is only evaluated once, and it's very inefficient and in fact surprising to perform later re-evaluations.

Furthermore, this behavior can be useful. If you don't want it, you just use `None` as the default and then assign in the function body. However, if you do want it, there would be no other way to get it, and no similarly easy workaround.

Finally, had there been a consensus of it being a wart, it would have been removed in Python 3.x. It wasn't.

>I use Python and it's OK, but I find a lot of the breathless hype around it as a language a little baffling as there are more than an average number of stupidities in there.

There are many warts that will never go away simply because they're embedded so much within the culture of the language and because undoing the wart would break so much working code.

I love python and I've used it every day for 15 years but there are core parts of the language I hate with a passion.

If in 3.9:

* "if x" started failing with an exception for most non-boolean values of x (e.g. lists, strings, numbers, etc.)

* strings stopped being iterable by default

then I'd be celebrating, but I know it's never going to happen.

> "if x" started failing with an exception for non-boolean values of x

I would call that a personal preference, and one that is far from consensus, rather than a "wart".

A wart is a known problem in the language, that most users consider to exert a negative impact on their usecases. Example would be Type Erasure in Java, which is there for historical reasons, can not be fixed, and is generally agreed by Java programmers to be a Bad Thing.

There isn't anything like this consensus for the changes you are suggesting.

All other mainstream languages support use of non-booleans as predicates, including for example C++ and Java, which are statically typed.

This change would make Python more strict about typing than virtually all mainstream static languages! Given how Python is dynamically typed, I'd suspect this change would be extremely unpopular.

> strings stopped being iterable by default

Again, not something most people would use. There are many fields in which strings are used to store sequences of characters where each character has a meaning. In all those fields, `for char in string` is a very useful idiom.

I'm not sure how this is a wart or what's your usecase that string iterability is breaking. Indeed, strings being iterable is in line with the general iterability philosophy and unlikely to change (which is a good thing for most users).

>I would call that a personal preference

shrug it's two features that I see causing two classes of bugs on an extremely regular basis.

It's a trade off that affects everybody, but it's hard to weight up the trade off without a lot of experience.

>There isn't anything like this consensus for the changes you are suggesting.

Exactly what I said, yes...

>This change would make Python more strict about typing than virtually all mainstream static languages!

I think dialing up the strictness is a good thing and so do the language designers (that was the idea behind introducing type hints).

>Again, not something most people would use.

That's exactly the point. Making strings iterable list of characters isn't something that most people use - its primary function is to cause weird bugs for functions that take lists of strings (and you get an output like 'm', 'y', 'd', etc.).

Changing it so that you'd have to do string.chars to get an iterable list would, at very little cost, cut out a pretty common class of bug.

Function definitions are evaluated once and early. Easy rule to learn and not really problematic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com