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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

My experience with Python is that a mid sized code base does not survive a full staff turnaround. So somewhere around the time the last original author is gone, the codebase becomes a haunted graveyard - scary to everyone. Also, unit tests are not a substitute for static typing - they obviously help a lot but don't prevent the degradation.

This is based on 3 different companies, of which all had decent developers who did follow good practices.

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>>> My experience with Python is that a mid sized code base does not survive a full staff turnaround. So somewhere around the time the last original author is gone, the codebase becomes a haunted graveyard - scary to everyone.

This is 100% true for medium to large codebases. Also because of the dynamic typing just looking at the codebase, it is very hard to understand the "shape" of variables and data. Of course this is improving now because of the type hints, but still it is comparatively hard.

> it is very hard to understand the "shape" of variables and data

And is it in, let's say Java, with several inheritance levels and very opaque types? It's one thing I struggle with

Sure you know a TypeA has method do_stuff() and returns a TypeB but what actually is happening, beats me. Then you chase down TypeA and find out the actual implementation is spread across TypeA0, TypeBaseA and you can't make sense of anything

Yes, the ecosystem encourages complex hierarchies and abuse of "patterns" but at least the standard tooling has no problems with things like "find me all places this method is called from" or "find me all implementations of this method". YMMV, but my experience with plain Java is better than with Python.

That was about plain Java. Where it stops working is some "dependency injection" frameworks which jumped the shark and stopped being about dependency injection (cough Guice cough). A fracking argument to a method comes from god-knows-where because The Framework injects it based on a combination of its class and and annotation? Yes, now it is as bad as Python or maybe even worse :)

Finding references isn't really that much harder in Python, it tends to work almost always with e.g. Pycharm and has for a long time. There's of course always the shotgun approach and just searching for the identifier, which turns up all but the most opaque ways to do things (e.g. concatenating a string together, then doing getattr - which you can also do in Java with reflection). Ye olde metaprogramming tricks in Python would often elide inspectors like that of Pycharm, which is why it had e.g. special support for the Django or SQLalchemy ORMs. Personally, I've never been fond of those, and find the Java-zope-style code borderline unreadable (heavy reliance on magic, non-local effects and "oh that setuptools entry over there refers to this class here and that's how we load it" kind of tricks) and stuff like Django is (or was) not much better in some areas. More modern metaprogramming approaches can often be typed in Python, which resolves a lot of the issues with it.

All that being said, the by far most common cause of bugs in Python is None in my experience, not any of the shenanigans the language allows you to do.

Mid-sized (5k < loc < 100k?) can absolutely survive a complete "hostile takeover" from new developers, with all the same potential (but not mandatory) issues and pitfalls that pretty much any such codebase invites, in particular in dynamically typed languages.

The problem here seems to me that apparently none of the remaining devs know how to use Python, not that Python itself is hard to read. Or that for some reason the original devs had no style conventions or good practices whatsoever, which you really can't blame on the language.

True, but that’s where type hints come in - this way you get best of both worlds.

Oh man, I love Python but what you say does sound truthful to me. Do you think that other programming languages are more resilient to this? (I'm trying to figure out whether there are some intrinsics of Python that make it more susceptible, and if so whether that could be mitigated)

I think Go is currently the best replacement for Python. Static type system seems to help a lot, also Go is slightly boring to write. One would say it's a bad thing but all those "if err != nil {" give something pretty valuable - the visibility of all the error-handling execution paths to the reader of the code.

Also, being boring to write means you seek ways not to write so much, which is also good :)

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