Maybe it's me but I don't get it. I get the meme, but please explain to me why python is considered so much easier than other languages.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is interpreted and the toolkit that it attracts, not the language itself. Having something that's interpreted and as someone normalize grammar, that's the attraction to python. The look of the language is much more forced as well. (No K&R versus ANSI debates)
If Perl wasn't so junky/hacky, perl would still be a major language and probably a lot faster. I like Perl a lot by the way so I'm kind of beating up my own language of choice.
Python is easier for people to do computer science assignments in in university.
It's dogshit for anything that's enterprise at scale. I don't understand what anyone sees in it outside of university. The multithreading alone is disqualifying. Anything it does good, it does good because it's delegating to C++ libraries.
Instagram famously runs on django (python framework).
Feel free to change your thoughts on python.
Is python less effiencient than other languages? Yes, but compute for simple calcs and requests is almost free and horizontal scaling is a thing. Dev productivity is more important.
Path dependency doesn't mean it's not dogshit. Facebook runs on a PHP derivative they wrote themselves, because they were originally written in PHP. That doesn't mean PHP is good.
I don't understand what people find so easy about Python that can't be solved with a good IDE and another language. Is it just the boilerplate reduction and the terse syntax?
Okay but the multithreading... what do you do about the multithreading? For IO tasks, standard threads work fine. But for real CPU parallelism, you still have to spawn a whole new Python interpreter per worker! Because Python forces you to use separate processes instead of true threads for CPU work, you can't share memory between them seamlessly.
I'm used to leading edge Java development, and that is stuff that even 10+ year old Java 8 could do. It felt like stepping in a time machine. New Java has virtual threads, which are magic that have basically no overhead and no drawbacks.
I really have to disagree strongly with that. With hyperthreading (x2 to everything) laptops have a dozen real+virtual cores nowadays at the low end, even phones have 8 typically.
That's just performance on the table, an order of magnitude or so on the table. I hate slow applications. If you want to make something go fast nowadays the answer is multicore. We've only been inching up the single core performance the last decade.
Also, I realize not everyone does server programming or enterprise programming, but it's absolutely mandatory for that.
Yeah, I can understand it. I remember when our development shot went to python and I was trying to do embedded python and a database. It was very awkward. Doing it in Pearl was very easy.
Sometimes I feel that python went to its end and then it started trying to dig itself out of its hole especially when it came to multithreading and the GIL. Basically they said okay do everything using processes or use the async library. That was their answer to the lack of a good multi-threading capability. At least Perl did never try to play pretend it was going to be a multi-threaded language. You paint variables is being shared so that you can pass them between the heavy threads. The same way that you paint each usage of a variable with a sigil
It's basically a fork and exact underneath the covers with locking semantics so you know that it's between 2 to 50 megs per thread and you use them accordingly. This was fine because a lot of times you were reading files concurrently so this overhead wasn't too bad. Besides you were normally ssh in across different servers to get to the server that you wanted and you were escaping the command line along the way. I remember I had to nest a command maybe three or four levels deep escaping it which using substitution and regular expressions was very easy to do all in parallel
Python tried to play pretend and bit off more than it could chew and it did with threads and then at the end it now deprecates that entire library. I don't like when a languages bot genuine and it tries to play pretend like it's efficient and hides it's efficiencies
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u/ubd12 2d ago
Maybe it's me but I don't get it. I get the meme, but please explain to me why python is considered so much easier than other languages.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is interpreted and the toolkit that it attracts, not the language itself. Having something that's interpreted and as someone normalize grammar, that's the attraction to python. The look of the language is much more forced as well. (No K&R versus ANSI debates)
If Perl wasn't so junky/hacky, perl would still be a major language and probably a lot faster. I like Perl a lot by the way so I'm kind of beating up my own language of choice.