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Comment by z9znz | Hacker News Reader

Numpy is a great thing, and also a terrible thing (because it is built on Python).

Python is a terrible language compared to many others, not the least of which is Ruby (and I would include Java, Clojure, Elixir, and even C++ and probably C# and almost certainly F# if I knew them well).

To make matters worse, there's a common mentality amongst Pythonistas of being aggressively complacent. A typical response to a question about a missing capability is, "Why would you ever need that?"

I have a lengthy collection of "why Python sucks" notes. However, I would argue that anyone who disagrees that Python is bad (excepting the practical capabilities afforded by libraries like Numpy which could just as well have been build for other languages) has simply not spent enough time other other, better languages.

Python is Blub, from the Paul Graham essay Beating the Averages. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

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Sorry, that discussion is so overrated and elitist. I'll never understand people complaining about one technology/language/tool that made it possible to dozens of people to join to the - once restrict - small club which was computer science and which is now making it possible to a lot of people to get a job with an easy to learn and less verbose language. One can argue about speed/memory/better languages out there to make data science (hello Julia) but that's just how the world out there works. Python has a great/dope community that I didn't find when I worked with C back in the day, for example.

> Python has a great/dope community

Python's community is one of the greatest and worst parts of the language. Python might not be the best language for anything, but it's the second best language for everything.

I've dabbled in many programming languages, a lot of which are backed by a single large company or consultancy:

- Java (Oracle, at least initially)

- TypeScript, C# (Microsoft)

- Golang, Dart (Google)

- Elixir (Nubank)

- Clojure (Cognitect)

- Kotlin (JetBrains)

- Objective-C, Swift (Apple)

- Julia (Julia Computing)

Then, there are languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Rust, etc. that are more diversified and distributed in terms of core contributors, maintainers, and evangelists. Meanwhile, there's a long list of other lesser known languages that have failed to grow a community as large as Python's.

As I get older and older, I have realized that our programming languages are not static entities, but they change and evolve over time. They are influenced by users, companies, and researchers. I hope that one day, there's a humanities subject that studies programming languages just like we study natural languages like in linguistics. The closest thing right now seems to be history of science, but it's quite a broad field.

> Python's community is one of the greatest and worst parts of the language.

If you come from a Ruby background, and you are now doing Python, you may find yourself on Stackoverflow looking up how to do X idomatically in Python (something you did all the time in Ruby). Or you may ask colleagues who know Python but do not know Ruby.

A common answer from the Pythonista community is, "Why would you ever want to do that?" (or Why would you need that?)

Ternary operators? Who needs that. Ok sure, here, but let's make it awkward. Where did Python get the model to do "x = 1 if y else 2"? But ironically, unlike Ruby where you can say "x = 1 if y", in Python you cannot do that. Oh, but you cannot say "x = 1 if y else return". That's not allowed.

Python has finally, as of 3.10, added a switch statement. This is something that many other languages have had for ages. You should see the contortions people have gone to to approximate a switch statement in Python... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60208/replacements-for-s...

The Python community may have some good, helpful, and friendly people; but most programming communities have that. That is not a plus for any language, because it should be a given.

I'm not a Pythonista by any means, but these complaints are banal. Ternary operators? Plenty of new popular languages don't have a ternery operator (Go, Rust, Elixir, Kotlin, Nim).

My list of python gripes are long, but language constructs are not on the list.

The point is about inconsistency.

You can say "x = 1 if expr else 2", but you cannot say "x = 1 if expr". You do a two line

if expr:

    x = 1

You cannot say "x = 1 if expr else return".

[1] is a list with one item, 1.

{1} is a set with one item, 1.

(1) is a number, 1, with pointless parenthesis. Perhaps you mean (1,), a tuple containing only one value.

Or how about mutable default values in function paramters? That makes a lot of sense...

I don't need to keep offering examples. You can search the internet and find many places where people list the warts, inconsistencies, and misfeatures of Python.

> You can say "x = 1 if expr else 2", but you cannot say "x = 1 if expr". You do a two line

This one liner works:

    if expr: x = 1

> Or how about mutable default values in function paramters? That makes a lot of sense...

This can be helpful under certain circumstances (e.g. memoization) [1]. The linked article also points out that it can be useful for rebinding global names in optimized code.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1145781

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200221224620id_/http://effbot....

> if expr: x = 1

But PEP8 and now the all-too-popular Black formatter disallow this. I think it's fine.

The momoization/optimization point is exactly the opposite of what should be a default use case for a beginner friendly language. And I highly doubt this mutable default design was intentional for these purposes. They are footguns.

These are pointless nitpicks. Every language has things like this. In 4 years of using Python in anger I’ve never written a line of code that could be improved by the features you list.

> These are pointless nitpicks. Every language has things like this. In 4 years of using Python in anger I’ve never written a line of code that could be improved by the features you list.

This is exactly the kind of response one often hears from the Python community. Translated it means, "I'm ok with it this way, so who cares if it could be better?"

Java is one of the few languages that actually has a specification and multiple, very different implementations. So I don't believe it is fair to call out it as being backed by a single company (even though in practise Oracle is indeed the one doing the most work on the platform, and they are doing a spectacular work at that). Even if Oracle would disappear tomorrow, Java has enough usage by many huge companies that the platform wouldn't even skip a beat.

Use any language you like to build a proof of concept.

But one you need to take that POC and build a real product which needs to be supported, extended, and maintained, then you must choose tools which fit that long term need.

Many of use first experienced school in kindergarten. Kindergarten was an important step in our education and socialization. But we didn't refuse to move on to the next level, no matter how much fun it was or how nice our teachers were. Maybe some people felt unsure about leaving their comfort zone, but there's no progress without risk and effort.

Is a university student elitist because they know something a kindergarten kid doesn't? Should they stop trying to promote continued growth through the educational levels?

If you were to use production Python on any decent sized project, and you had also used Ruby (just one example... some other languages can be even more succinct), then you would hate Python.

The issue with a lot of the gripes with Python is that there's no other language that combines mature linear algebra libraries, scientific computing libraries, and industry standard computer vision libraries with easy to use basic tools like csv reading, dataframes, json parsing, etc., while also providing easy syntax and fast iteration time. I work in C++ and Python, and things that are completely trivial in Python have a lead time measured in days, if not weeks when moving to C++. This is before even getting into the weeds of writing bug-free C++ code; you need to be familiar with the nitty-gritty details of the library you're working with, because things you might take for granted may not work the way you think.

Sure, maybe we should be rewriting POC code in a language that's more fit-for-purpose if we're talking about a large project, but for that you need mature libraries, or a team with some fairly serious chops (i.e. decent math background, senior coders, expensive to hire, and hard to replace). There's a lot to be said for a language that makes it easy to be productive on technically demanding problems, while also making it easy to find new talent. As someone who's written code relying on linear algebra and CV in Rust and C#, and I'd honestly pick Python every time for those types of jobs. It's not perfect, but that's not the benchmark.

I would not advocate for rewriting everything in non-Python. It is what it is, and it excels at tasks related to the important libraries discussed in this topic.

Just as Python wraps the libraries which do the heavy lifting in C, I would try to keep the Python wrapper as minimal as possible and stick some interface in front of that. Instead what happens often is people choose to either build more and more around this important stuff, staying with Python, or they say, "We're better off just supporting one language in-house, and Python is required already; so we are a Python shop."

It truly does depend on what you’re building, in which organization and with whom you’re doing it.

If you’re building a production system with a small, stable team, and Python is a good fit for the work, then there is no reason not to use it.

If you’re doing programming in the large with a large and constantly changing team, then you’d be wise to pick a statically typed language that many people know (basically C# or Java)

Your education example is off base. Python is not a more basic form of programming that one passes through on the way to enlightenment. It’s hand screwdrivers vs hammer drills or diesel pickups vs electric sedans. Different tools for different contexts.

It's a joy to work with, it's perfect for glue work, it reads like pseudo-code which makes it accessible for the non-programmers and children, it has a bustling community which means it's easy to find solutions should one encounter problems, it has a flourishing library, it's a great gateway language. For these reasons and more I posit that Python was perhaps one of the great milestones in the history of c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ mankind, and Guido probably deserves a Turing award.

Paul Graham's essay is pretty bad, I really don't see any reason to cite it as he himself is pretty much at the "wrong" end of the blubness spectrum, as LISPs are not "God's language", modern PL research has plenty of areas not applicable to them in the general case (and no, just because you have macros and in theory can implement everything doesn't make it still the same language). It's almost like languages have different tradeoffs, and there is no one axis to place them on.

It's quite funny how you and some others here are saying python got into it's place by pure luck and being installed by default on linux systems.

Then you turn around and mention Ruby. I recall that there was a lot of hype around it for quite a while, largely due to Ruby on Rails (certainly outhyping Python), and it's popularity in terms of usage was very similar to Python. However, that did not last, so why is that? Are you saying Python "hyping" and default installation only happened after ~2011 (where Ruby really started to decline compared to Python)?

I would argue the success of Python is largely due to people building some packages like numpy and scipy in Python, because they sort it was the best tool for the job. Then came the ML wave and Python due to that ecosystem was ideally placed as a language that was easy to use for ML researchers. That you mention C++ even in that comparison shows that you do not understand why people use Python. I can tell you if I had to get my graduate students to use C++ for their analysis and lab automation tasks, we'd still be graphing by hand.

Luck no, path-dependency yes.

Numpy is fantastic and so is scipy, but there's no inherent reason why they couldn't have been "numruby" or "numlua".

With that said, I agree with you that your parent's thesis isn't really operative, Python and Ruby are almost exactly the same technology, therefore the decision on which one to use depends on the available ecosystem. Everything else is effectively rounding error.

>excepting the practical capabilities afforded by libraries like Numpy which could just as well have been build for other languages

So it's bad, except for all of the practical things you can do with it. And other languages could have had something like Numpy ... but didn't, for some reason. Not really seeing why this makes Python bad.

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