Python Sucks And I LOVE It | Prime Reacts

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[riemervdzee]

Python is the second best language for every software problem

[davejohncole]

LOL. Just stumbled on this.

I wrote a C extension for Python that eventually became the CSV module in Python.

I did it because i was working on a fixed price project dealing with 100's of megabytes of CSV files exported from SQL Server via Excel (don't ask... Finance people are strange). Each iteration of my code during development took 45 minutes using a pure Python parser I wrote to strictly implement Excel semantics. It was literally costing me money that Python was so slow.

I figured I could develop the parser in C and finish the project in less time than just continuing in pure Python. Turned out I was right.

I submitted the pretty raw code to the Python project and over a couple of months, with the help of two other people, made it a lot nicer to use.

[CottidaeSEA]

The thing I like about Python is that it's really good for getting basic things out of the way quickly. As long as you have a library that does the thing you need to do, you'll probably have good performance, because that'll be written in a more performant language.

[macaroni_italic]

I used to be vehemently against Python for superficial reasons until I actually learned it. Sure, it's overly opinionated about shit that doesn't matter (indentation) and it has a few truly gross quirks (loop variables are available out the loop itself, rather than being scoped to it). But it's just a really fantastic scripting language. If you're trying to write something quick and dirty to solve an immediate problem, it's really hard to go wrong with Python. It reads and writes like a perfect, formalized version of pseudocode. It's got great built-in libraries, and its popularity means that it has shit-tons of amazing third-party libraries covering pretty much any use case you can imagine. And honestly, gripes about performance are completely overblown. Nobody is trying to write bare-metal systems code in Python, and if they are, they've simply chosen the wrong tool. That doesn't make Python a bad language.

[timmy]

As an embedded dev, who usually develops for embedded Linux systems:
- I'm all in on C/C++, whenever there is time to build something.
- I'm all in on Python3, if management wants it by yesterday!
I rather spend my evenings working on my own coding projects, versus working unpaid overtime in C/C++ due to management being incapable of planning ahead!

[frustratedalien]

I relate with this guy. I had a few years of experience writing assembly, C, and C++ code when I first came across Google's Python training videos. I could code but I didn't like coding. 2 days with Python totally changed that. I remember writing a script in 30 minutes that scraped transit timetables from a website and helped me finish a data analysis project that would have typically taken me a long time to write. I've loved Python ever since and though I spent years writing Java, I finally managed to switch to Python professionally and love it. New releases of Java, especially with Streams have made Java a lot easier to like, but I still prefer to use Python for nearly all of my personal projects. The new proposal to remove the GIL from Python should make it run a lot faster soon

[khhnator]

the problem is that every small program eventually will become a massive enterprise mess

[itmecube]

"Lisp is used to tell other people you do Lisp." - Rust guy who does Rust

[AdamHoelscher]

I very much enjoy your videos on the whole. Your mix of bawdy humor and blunt CS commentary has me constantly swinging between learning something fantastically valuable and laughing away the annoyances of my career.

This one especially spoke to me. I work as a Data Scientist. I will out-Excel 99% of the world, I learned VBA (shudder) as my first language, I love R for my EDA and I will script any random thing that I expect to run twice (once when I think I know what's going on, again when I realize I f'ed up and it's more complex than I thought) in Python. My employer is constantly pushing for more speed and that has me deep in Go and and exploring Rust. These are all fantastic tools, *for purpose*. I'll never write a Go program to graph correlation from a sample data set, and I'll never write R to run a publicly exposed web server. People who shit on a certain tool don't understand the power of context and the fact that you, the Crustious Crustacean Youtuber I know of, will flat out say "Python can be a quick W; when you just need to get something done, get it done" makes me smile. Sometimes, it's just the right tool.

[cusematt]

I am just starting my coding journey. Your videos have this incredible way at jabbing at the little idiosyncratic nuisances that even a beginner like myself encounters. Really entertaining channel man I have laughed out loud several times. Quite informative too honestly, since sometimes making fun of a certain issue makes it more relatable to our own experiences, which makes it easier for us to understand why that certain issue exists in the first place. Holy run on sentence.

[Taverius]

I can believe the LISP thing, once you've done enough CL/Scheme/Clojure the parenthesis madness disappears like the code of the matrix and you just see the tree of code, it's like learning Vim motions. Takes a *while* to get there tho ngl 🤣

[TheRandomFool]

The main reason I learned Python was because of my hobby in higher mathematics. The open source software SageMath is wonderful and is built on slightly modified Python.

[vikramkrishnan]

Lisp actually takes very little time to develop because code = data. So you design your data structs and algos follow naturally. I wrote some Clojure code and it was a pleasure to write in

[carlwilde]

Pythonista - An anagram of “A Hypnotist”

[haxwithaxe]

In the past 8 years I don't think I've come across situations where python wasn't performant enough with room to spare even when I was doing things that needed to be as fast as possible (DNS server oddly enough). More than 8 years ago I did a bunch of image processing that python couldn't do in a timely manner. That was doing a visual diff between documents thousands of pages long.

[billy]

On the point about type script being "enterprise" and allowing you to build these huges messes

python has inbuilt type hints with generics and union types now

[leetaeryeo]

This article really captured my thoughts on Python well. It's not the most performant language out there in terms of raw execution speed (you can improve it with Cython or PyPi, but still, it's never gonna be C or Go or Rust), but the speed and ease at which you're able to just solve a problem with a usually reasonable level of performance just feels good. I've started using it a lot for smaller automation tasks and alerts for technologies that don't have good tools for alerting. And Flask legit is just my favorite micro web framework (despite all the problems with microservice architectures). The productivity is just so nice, so long as you keep in mind that you need to use the right tool for the right problem (a Netflix-scale web API probably needs something more performant).

[xesf]

I end-up in python for obvious ml reasons and I agree with the article. It is a joy to script in python exactly because you can get stuffs up and running pretty fast. For me is like executing pseudo-code!!!

[Xemptuous]

Python is what I use at work, and it's so easy to do simple things like getting data from APIs and doing ETLs and other data manipulation. It's like bash in that it's super easy to automate and finish something quickly that works "fast enough" for most things that most people need.

[hotfishdev]

The best program is the one that does its job. A program cannot do its job unless it is written. If Python lets you actually write the program where another language would have been a blocker, it was the best language for the job. If you need to consider changing the implementation language later, you’ve won.