1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
FWIW, I tend to think of comparisons to Perl as being a lot like Nazi comparisons, only for programming languages. And I do think there's some wisdom to the Godwin's Law idea that the first person to make a Nazi comparison is understood to have automatically lost the argument.
It's just that, at this point, Perl is both so near-universally reviled, and so well-understood to be way too optimized for code golf, that any comparison involving it is kind of a conversation-killer. As soon as it shows up, your best options are to either quietly ignore the statement in which the comparison was made, or join in escalating things into a flamewar.
I've never regretted a Perl program that I wrote, used and discarded. And I've never been content with a Perl program I found I was still using a week after I wrote it.
My understanding of Python will probably never be quite as good as my understanding of C, but I can live with that.
- Music That Matters: https://omny.fm/shows/kexp-presents-music-that-matters/playl...
- KEXP Song of the Day: https://omny.fm/shows/kexp-song-of-the-day
- All Songs Considered: https://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510019
- KCRW Today's Top Tune: https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/todays-top-tune/rss.xml
I’d argue it’s easier now to stay in sync than even when MTV was popular. MTV you needed a cable subscription and be sitting at a TV, now SiriusXM or Apple/Google/Spotify can stream it right to your phone laptop or tablet, and regular FM radio will play it on the local Top 40 station.
IMO, the more complex a system is, the more fragile it tends to become. The same is true for programming languages. Features will clash with each other. You'll end up having 10 different ways to achieve the same thing, and it won't be obvious which direction to go.
Furthermore, I did my grad studies in compilers. I've thought about writing an optimizing JIT for Python. I really feel like CPython is needlessly slow, and it's kind of embarassing, in an age where single-core performance is reaching a plateau, to waste so many CPU cycles interpreting a language. We have the technology to do much better. However, the fact that Python is a fast moving target makes it very difficult to catch up. If Python were a smaller, more stable language, this wouldn't be so difficult.
Many have tried and failed, Google and Dropbox to name a couple, and countless other attempts.
Lastly, AFAIK, CPython's FFI API is actually more of a problem than the dynamic semantics of the language. You can expose Python objects directly to C code. That makes it very hard for a JIT to represent said Python objects in an efficient way internally.
I disagree with this, which is precisely why I prefer feature rich languages like Java or better yet Kotlin. It doesn't get much more readable than something like:
users.asSequence()
.filter { it.lastName.startsWith("S") }
.sortedBy { it.lastName }
.take(3)
Probably before then too.
(He'd also written about that more at length in the 1990s in On Lisp, but many more people became acquainted with his language-design ideas in the 2001–2003 period, thanks to Lightweight Languages and his increasingly popular series of essays.)
Anyway, I'm talking specifically about the use of the identifier "it" in Kotlin, not implicitly or contextually defined identifiers in general, which are indeed a much more widespread concept, embracing Perl's $_ and @_, awk's $0 (and for that matter $1 and $fieldnumber and so on), Dyalog APL's α and ω, Smalltalk's "self", C++'s "this", dynamically-scoped variables in general, and for that matter de Bruijn numbering.
Compared to the existence of Perl, yes. Anyone who does any amount of Perl learns that $_ is the implicit argument ("like 'it'") to most functions. It's pretty much one of Perl's main deals. The talk has about 100K views on YouTube, which is pretty good, but Perl is in another league.
I think if you like this idea, you will really like the book. Better still, you can download the pdf for free.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_macro [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
users.asSequence()
.filter { user ->
user.lastName.startsWith("S")
}
.sortedBy { user ->
user.lastName
}
.take(3)Though I will conceed that I also find the fluent interface variant nicer.
sorted((u for u in users
if u.last_name.startswith("S")),
key=lambda u: u.last_name
)[:3]
sorted((u for u in users
if last_name(u).startswith("S")),
key=last_name
)[:3]
On top of the lessened readability, the Kotlin version makes it very easy to add, subtract, or comment out lines/actions which really helps when debugging. The Kotlin version is almost identical in structure to how you’d do it in Rust, Elixir, etc.
It should also be noted that Python would allow a more functional style, possibly leaving out the list comprehension.
The map filter chaining is obviously simpler, but python code is not that difficult and it's a no brainer task anyway.
It does contain a generator expression though, which is the same as a list comprehension in general structure, but slightly more confusing because it doesn't have the relationship to lists that square brackets in a list comprehension would have given it.
My point, though, was that not being able to tell the difference was a key "tell" that the comment author was not very familiar with Python — in some contexts, that would tend to undermine credibility in their comment (and then it would be rude to point it out), but in this context, it probably makes their opinion more objective.
Python is for the most part overrated when it comes to these things, IMO. It's a nice enough language but it's aged badly and has an undeserved reputation for concision, readability and being "simple".
The method chaining syntax and the query syntax are alternatives. I think most devs lean towards the former, considered to be cleaner... whereas the latter is probably easier to learn in the beginning, to those unfamiliar with piping/functional style - owing to its SQL feel-alikeness.
ReSharper would offer converting the latter to the former, and that's how I learned method-chaining LINQ back in the day.
users.apply {
asSequence()
filter { it.lastName.startsWith("S")
sortedBy { it.lastName }
take(3)
}
That's not universally true. C# has more features than Java but is generally easier to read and the intent of the code is easier to follow. The lack of features, like properties or unsigned integers, leads to Java coders creating much more convoluted solutions.
If languages with less features were universally better we would all be using C and BASIC for everything.
I can plainly see how these changes will actually make my code cleaner and more obvious while saving me keystrokes.
I also don't think these changes are very drastic. They're opt-in, doesn't break anything and looks to lead to cleaner code. I love the walrus operator (not so sure about the name, but hey. C++ is getting the spaceship operator... As has been said, naming things is hard). To me, the change of print from a statement to a function has been the hardest Python chamge over the years. Just too much mental momentum. Even though ive been on Python 3 for years, I still make the mistake of trying to use it as a statement. That said, I think it was the right (if painful) move.
I don't speak for everyone over 35, just myself.
Anecdote : i'm fairly young, but i've been involved with python long enough and traveled to enough pycons to be a bit jaded with regards to change within the language.
I'm fairly certain it's only due to the additional cognitive load that's thrust upon me when I must learn a new nuance to a skill that I already considered myself proficient at.
in other words : i'm resistant to change because i'm lazy, and because it (the language, and the way I did things previously) works for me. Both reasons are selfish and invalid, to a degree.
Anyone making this argument should be prepared to to accept every single criticism they make in their life moving forward can be framed as 'their resistance to change'.
This kind of personalization of specific criticism is disingenuous and political and has usually been used as a PR strategy to push through unpopular decisions. Better to respond to specific criticisms than reach for a generic emotional argument that seeks to delegitimize scrutiny and criticism.
I stopped writing C++ at some point in 2008/2009 but I still keep track of it to some extent and I'm continually surprised by the nonsense that is introduced into the language. The whole RAII movement, for example, is just one massive band-aid on top of the previous mistake of allowing exceptions, etc..
It'd be mostly fine in the long run, but you have all these people using like 15% of C++ and complain about it all day long, making their libraries not usable from stuff that understands C (most of which have drastically improved on the whole paradigm). There's a solution here and it's not using whichever arbitrary percentage you've decided on of C++, it's realizing that there are way better languages with real interoperability in mind to talk about lower-level things.
Yep, I entered the Python world with v2. I eventually reconciled myself to 2.7, and have only recently and begrudgingly embraced 3. Being over 35, I must be incredibly open minded on these things.