Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtodea | Hacker News Reader

What makes you say that about Python?

it's become a complicated language with many different ways to do the same thing but none of them very good

To add to that, it's introduced as a 'simple' language. But, in 2023, the cumulative effort one puts into getting things "right" is bigger than effort you would put in learning something that's described as high learning curve.

As an anecdote: Someone described elixir to be a "high learning curve" language if I wasn't exposed to Functional Programming. When I inquired how long they mean by that, the answer was 2-4 months. Which really says something about our attention spans.

Popularity dooms the simplicity of almost every language.

Re: Elixir, not surprising. Makes for more opportunities for some though.

Simplicity is for elitists.

Maybe some of you remember Didier Verna's Lisp, Jazz, Aikido: https://www.didierverna.com/blog/index.php?post/2007/04/03/L...

It's not hard to sympathize with Verna's feelings. These are all based on a similar set of philosophical guideposts: maximal output for minimal input, maximal possibilities of self-expression from a minimal set of generative rules, and understanding the deep "essence" of the craft, so that when you add your own contributions, it is by finding the "essence" of the addition and harmonizing it with the essence of existing work. And these are appealing because they give the feeling of tremendous power and the sky being the limit.

But the real world runs on the philosophy of Visual Basic, punk rock, and mixed martial arts, which are all based on a different set of philosophical guideposts: a) focus on practical solutions to real world problems; b) make getting started as easy as possible for everyone; c) it doesn't matter if added components harmonize with the original; what matters is if they contribute significant value on points a) and b), i.e., it's okay to get messy.

I came back to Python after several years, and there's type-checking now, which we're required to use at work. Way to ruin the entire point of Python.

Also, Python's async stuff was always terrible until they introduced the new async/await feature, but I suppose that's part of the "many ways to do the same thing" you mention. They should've done it from the beginning IMO, but it was hard to predict maybe.

I don't have many complaints about the language itself, but I've found the packaging ecosystem to be the most complicated and frankly dysfunctional that I've used in the last decade.

I never understand this complaint when Javascript/Typescript is sitting there with a mess of .lock and .json files across multiple tools that sometimes interoperate and sometimes don't.

Package management isn't a solved problem; Python employs standard patterns for it; Significantly better than chained Makefiles from my C-development days.

I didn't say it was a solved problem - it isn't! - but rather that I find python's solution particularly bad. The situation in C (and C++) is indeed even worse, I just haven't been doing that for the last decade. Things I've used in the last decade that all work better, in my opinion: Bundler, NPM, Maven, Cargo, and even Go's packaging.

I always liked python, but I didn't use it at all really for a very long time until recently, and I've just honestly been surprised by the poor state its packaging seems to be in.

NodeJS has NPM, which is simple. Usually when you want to run someone else's NodeJS project, you `npm install && npm start`. Most Python projects have a Dockerfile, which shows you how bad the actual package management is.

TS is just JS but with extra things that can go wrong (Babel etc) and not being able to use simple `require` syntax anymore and some not-very-automatic type checking that you don't need; I don't use it. It's like taking a steak fresh off the grill and smothering it with mayonnaise.

unless you're Dutch

> Explicit is better than implicit

Says the language whose code-block-endings are invisible! I will never understand the desire of people to make the important punctuation in their language invisible. Python, CoffeeScript, YAML. These people just hate being able to see the important flow-determining punctuation in their language!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com