Re: [dev] What is bad with Python

From: Alex Pilon <alp_AT_alexpilon.ca>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2014 20:32:13 -0500

On Mon, Mar 03, 2014 at 11:21:02PM +0100, Szymon Olewniczak wrote:
> […] I must admit that I've found Python much less harmful that I had
> previously considered it to be.

Do you care about the language or a particular implementation?

For the latter, packaging sucks, it has libraries to deal with
real-world suck, it runs on sucky OSes.

Python 2 is inferior language-wise vis-à-vis Python 3.

> […] the code is readable and what is very important it simplify many
> things.

Do people on this list seriously consider using a language with inferior
namespacing, a primitive error model, lack of sometimes useful purely
functional constructs, certain data structures not in the standard
library, a very primitive type system, weak typing, tedious and
error-prone string manipulation, etc for performance-insensitive general
purpose programming?

I'm not advocating Python for memory, size, or execution time-sensitive
code, where absolute control is important, or when you want low
dependencies.

> In addition it has many great libraries so why do not use Python at
> least as a prototype language.

Should we care about *prototype* languages in the context of suckless?

> Mayby it's multi-paradigm aproach is the problem but what alternatives
> to python do you see?

How is that a flaw? Dogmatism is a disease. It's one of the reasons why
Java sucks, and C makes me write more boilerplate.

> awk?

Do you really want to use awk for things that aren't its specialty? It's
a great language in its own right, not a general-purpose language, in
spite of its Turing completeness.

> And at last what do you thing about Ruby which is quite similar to the
> python in many aspects?

Ruby has more powerful lambdas (“blocks” as they call them), has more
shorthand (not that I consider that that great actually), etc. Anyhow,
do you care about the implementation or the language itself?

Regards,

Alex Pilon

Received on Tue Mar 04 2014 - 02:32:13 CET

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