Why this sudden hype for Python?
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As if they just found the answer for this whole universe' existence. I asked one of the job applicants, a fresher what he wants to be. he says "Python developer". Which felt okay, to start with. Then I asked, after 5 years? Applicant: "Senior Python developer" Then I insisted, if he'd be interested to specialize any of the technology than tools. (We've had enough with people who could never adapt to change) Applicant: No, I want to be expert Python developer. I had to tell him I see no scope for growth or any long term plans for him in our company as we don't have rolls called "python SME, python super Expert, python Engineering manager/director & Python CEO, CTO & Python magician" Some or many of you might still feel specializing on a specific language and building career over it is fine, I might find it okay too if it's useful for the work. Unfortunately, for us, it's not. We have come around different tools and different needs requesting the devs to learn new tools to get things done. I did enquire with other folks why these kids are so obsessed with Python. Looks like their instructors at college have said "Python" is the future. That's where there money is. :( Im developing a fresh dislike for "Python".
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.
It is easy to learn... but that comes with it's own dangers. Because the schools can use Linus for free, they tend to and that environment lends itself to Python As mentioned elsewhere it is the darling of the Anti-Microsoft crowd, but there is a twist to that. In practical terms that means Amazon even more than Linux. You should be aware that Amazon is making a huge effort of social engineering, partly to sell AWS services, but there is more to it than that. They have a political agenda as well and that includes "programmers" as a commodity - staffing on demand. Python fits that because of its simplicity. Python is a money maker for AWs also, because it is not very efficient, so you will need more AWS computing resources to use it = more money for Amazon. One other reason for the popularity of Python though is that it is a practical alternative to FORTRAN. The science world has finally accepted a replacement for FORTRAN and that has made just about everyone happy. One other reason for the popularity of Python though is that it is a practical (free) alternative to Matlab. DataScience and data-mining is all the buzz now and Python has good capability for that - using C code to make it work.
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Python is the new Pascal. Good for learning, rarely used to run a business.
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
rarely used to run a business.
On a corporate level, yes, I agree with this. However, I know for a fact that many game development companies (AAA in fact), use Python/Django/etc. for their websites and web stuff, exclusively. Also, I am seeing an influx in MongoDB for the back-end on a lot of these gaming sites. Gaming may not be a big deal with a lot of the members here, but it is a multi-billion dollar industry. Just saying...
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Yes, the candidate's single-language fixation is a bit ridiculous but there's a flip-side to this. Employers frequently insist on commercial experience in specific languages. We've all seen those adverts that demand version X of this and version Y of that when what they actually need is someone who can program a computer. Whilst any good techie would recognise that a good Java programmer is likely to provide a lot more long-term benefit in a .NET shop than a lousy C# programmer ever will - HR types and recruitment pimps don't see the world that way. This means that we tend to get glued to a particular tech-stack whether we like it or not.
98.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.
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Python can be quite impressive. To name a few things: 1) Huge 3rd party support and many very decent libraries, and some really interesting stuff, including things like AI, deep learning, etc. 2) IDE's - Visual Studio, JetBrains PyCharm, umm, Eclipse, including debugging 3) [Project Jupyter](http://jupyter.org/) is cool 4) It's usually more concise than C#. [Example](https://marcclifton.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/who-was-born-on-your-birthday/). 5) It can be impressive:
>>> 2**160
1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542976- Cross platform -- I develop UI's and custom SBC hardware controllers in Python, and can write and debug the code (mocking the hardware I/O) in Windows and test it, move it over to the Debian box, and it works. :) 7) Django for web hosting is actually cool and well thought out, more so than Ruby on Rails, IMO, but then I'm biased against anything Ruby. 8) Brain dead simple to interface to C code, and more importantly, to build the library that can be imported into your Python app. 9) Docker / container support is trivial. Interfacing with Docker using Python is trivial. 10) Ruby is dying. Thank God. 11) My experience with Ruby was entangled with experiences of egoistic developers, similar to what I experienced when Java was all the rage. With Python, the egoism seems to be considerably toned down. That's important to me because egoistic developers tend to be dangerous, biased, opinionated, arses to work with. And they're actually really bad coders too. Cons: 1) It's slow, of course, being interpreted 2) If you want speed, code it in C (I personally haven't tried Python with C++) 3) It's scripted. PyLint helps to catch many stupid typos and construct errors that a C# IDE would redline for you before you even hit Build. While I'm forced to deal with Javascript/HTML/CSS (believe it or not, I still have to get my toes wet with TypeScript or similar) and occasionally SQL, C# is my language/bias of choice, Python is my go-to language for SBC and container development. At some point I'll probably poke at Go. For a lot of things, it's quite decent but so is, for example, C#, unless you're doing something specific where the answer is "Python would make this soooo much easier."
Latest Article - Class-less Coding - Minimalist C# and Why F# and Function Programming Has Some Advantages Learning to
Syntactically Python is one of the worst languages that are developed recently. Maybe there are others like that, I don't know. This is one of the languages where 'nothing' matters, as in white spaces define the structure of the program. Code reviews are made almost impossible because instead of answering a question 'is the program structure as-is correct?' you need to answer a question 'which of all possible structures would be correct?'. Simple yes/no becomes 'design same program that you're reviewing on the spot and see if you come up with same result'. Example:
if (x)
something()
somethingelse()Should somethingelse() be indented like this? If that code is already indented by 5 levels, maybe somethingelse() needs to be pulled back one level? two? three? People can't indent properly in languages where indentation is not important (curly brace languages, for example), and you'd expect them to indent something correctly where it is important? The initial hype came by showing: look, it's simple, i type '2+3', it prints '5'. An over-glorified calculator. Next, they print 'hello world' and see on console 'hello world', and it only takes one line of code instead of 10. Great. It makes simple things simpler and hard things almost impossible. There are tons of libraries written in Python, but i haven't seen data about how efficient Python is for developing these libraries, as opposed to some languages with static typing. Less lines of code does not mean it is overall efficient. Look at code golf on Stack Overflow, they solve small but relatively complex problems there using programs written with 10-20 Unicode characters that are incomprehensible for most developers. Writing a program is about 10% of the effort, maintaining it is another 90%, and languages should be such that maintenance is easier. Maintenance is not 'figuring out what the program does'. That part is trivial, run it through debugger with single-stepping and you see what it does. Maintenance is like any other reverse engineering, where you try to 'figure out what the developer was thinking when they developed that program'. With the example above it is not possible to say for sure if somethingelse() was thought of being part of that condition block or not. You'd need to reverse engineer the entire algorithm in that function, then think if you'd do it in the same way, and if you disagree, you'd do it differently, probably introducing more bugs because you don't have any guidance about original thinking. There
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As if they just found the answer for this whole universe' existence. I asked one of the job applicants, a fresher what he wants to be. he says "Python developer". Which felt okay, to start with. Then I asked, after 5 years? Applicant: "Senior Python developer" Then I insisted, if he'd be interested to specialize any of the technology than tools. (We've had enough with people who could never adapt to change) Applicant: No, I want to be expert Python developer. I had to tell him I see no scope for growth or any long term plans for him in our company as we don't have rolls called "python SME, python super Expert, python Engineering manager/director & Python CEO, CTO & Python magician" Some or many of you might still feel specializing on a specific language and building career over it is fine, I might find it okay too if it's useful for the work. Unfortunately, for us, it's not. We have come around different tools and different needs requesting the devs to learn new tools to get things done. I did enquire with other folks why these kids are so obsessed with Python. Looks like their instructors at college have said "Python" is the future. That's where there money is. :( Im developing a fresh dislike for "Python".
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.
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As if they just found the answer for this whole universe' existence. I asked one of the job applicants, a fresher what he wants to be. he says "Python developer". Which felt okay, to start with. Then I asked, after 5 years? Applicant: "Senior Python developer" Then I insisted, if he'd be interested to specialize any of the technology than tools. (We've had enough with people who could never adapt to change) Applicant: No, I want to be expert Python developer. I had to tell him I see no scope for growth or any long term plans for him in our company as we don't have rolls called "python SME, python super Expert, python Engineering manager/director & Python CEO, CTO & Python magician" Some or many of you might still feel specializing on a specific language and building career over it is fine, I might find it okay too if it's useful for the work. Unfortunately, for us, it's not. We have come around different tools and different needs requesting the devs to learn new tools to get things done. I did enquire with other folks why these kids are so obsessed with Python. Looks like their instructors at college have said "Python" is the future. That's where there money is. :( Im developing a fresh dislike for "Python".
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.
Vunic wrote:
I asked one of the job applicants, a fresher what he wants to be. he says "Python developer".
So someone with no experience relying on someone whose opinion they respect? Seems pretty normal to me. Now explain to me why people with decades of experience still make statements about stuff that was never true or was only true long ago. And when asked to back up their claims their only evidence often is "because everyone knows that".
Vunic wrote:
Then I asked, after 5 years?
Err...why ask that question at all?
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Python is great, but then so is C, C++, C#, Java ... The problem with these people is that what they really want is to be rich and famous. Actually doing some work is not in their mindset.
BANG! - Got it in one. I get on average about 15 questions a week on this on Quora, and every single one of them boils down to the same question. "Whats the fastest way for me to get from Zero Coder to Hero Coder, and the many glorious riches it will give me" Many of them fully believe that it's "All About the Code" and "How great the code looks", so they go hunting for "The easiest language", which for many usually ends up either being Python or JavaScript, why? Simple. Beacuse if you don't know how to do something then there's usually a module/library/bit of code that's just an 'NPM install' or 'PIP install' away.
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Python can be quite impressive. To name a few things: 1) Huge 3rd party support and many very decent libraries, and some really interesting stuff, including things like AI, deep learning, etc. 2) IDE's - Visual Studio, JetBrains PyCharm, umm, Eclipse, including debugging 3) [Project Jupyter](http://jupyter.org/) is cool 4) It's usually more concise than C#. [Example](https://marcclifton.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/who-was-born-on-your-birthday/). 5) It can be impressive:
>>> 2**160
1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542976- Cross platform -- I develop UI's and custom SBC hardware controllers in Python, and can write and debug the code (mocking the hardware I/O) in Windows and test it, move it over to the Debian box, and it works. :) 7) Django for web hosting is actually cool and well thought out, more so than Ruby on Rails, IMO, but then I'm biased against anything Ruby. 8) Brain dead simple to interface to C code, and more importantly, to build the library that can be imported into your Python app. 9) Docker / container support is trivial. Interfacing with Docker using Python is trivial. 10) Ruby is dying. Thank God. 11) My experience with Ruby was entangled with experiences of egoistic developers, similar to what I experienced when Java was all the rage. With Python, the egoism seems to be considerably toned down. That's important to me because egoistic developers tend to be dangerous, biased, opinionated, arses to work with. And they're actually really bad coders too. Cons: 1) It's slow, of course, being interpreted 2) If you want speed, code it in C (I personally haven't tried Python with C++) 3) It's scripted. PyLint helps to catch many stupid typos and construct errors that a C# IDE would redline for you before you even hit Build. While I'm forced to deal with Javascript/HTML/CSS (believe it or not, I still have to get my toes wet with TypeScript or similar) and occasionally SQL, C# is my language/bias of choice, Python is my go-to language for SBC and container development. At some point I'll probably poke at Go. For a lot of things, it's quite decent but so is, for example, C#, unless you're doing something specific where the answer is "Python would make this soooo much easier."
Latest Article - Class-less Coding - Minimalist C# and Why F# and Function Programming Has Some Advantages Learning to
Marc Clifton wrote:
Brain dead simple to interface to C code... If you want speed, code it in C (I personally haven't tried Python with C++)...While I'm forced to deal with Javascript/HTML/CSS
I am hoping that the domain of the problems for those two do not overlap.
Marc Clifton wrote:
For a lot of things
For the vast majority of things in the broad scope of all businesses any technology is sufficient. That is because the problems do not originate in the technology but rather in the vast array of other impacts that are involved in delivering something that works (as defined by the business). And because of that a significant factor in technology choice is nothing more than familiarity. Better to choose a tool that one knows, both how to use well and the limitations, rather than attempting to rationalize the choice for an unknown tool based on subjective views on it.
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Python, Java, iPads; as long as it is non-Microsoft "to prevent a vendor-lock in". ..and that attitude helped to create a lot of new 'institutes' that teach .NET in the past years. Most universities and academics would shudder of .NET / Visual BASIC courses :)
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^][](X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett)
I don't know. I made good living hanging around Microsoft platform/tools for 30 years. Never ventured too far from it. If I were to stay mainly in small shops and startups, my experience might be different, but all my experience had been with bigger companies/government so they are not shy licensing expensive tools.
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Syntactically Python is one of the worst languages that are developed recently. Maybe there are others like that, I don't know. This is one of the languages where 'nothing' matters, as in white spaces define the structure of the program. Code reviews are made almost impossible because instead of answering a question 'is the program structure as-is correct?' you need to answer a question 'which of all possible structures would be correct?'. Simple yes/no becomes 'design same program that you're reviewing on the spot and see if you come up with same result'. Example:
if (x)
something()
somethingelse()Should somethingelse() be indented like this? If that code is already indented by 5 levels, maybe somethingelse() needs to be pulled back one level? two? three? People can't indent properly in languages where indentation is not important (curly brace languages, for example), and you'd expect them to indent something correctly where it is important? The initial hype came by showing: look, it's simple, i type '2+3', it prints '5'. An over-glorified calculator. Next, they print 'hello world' and see on console 'hello world', and it only takes one line of code instead of 10. Great. It makes simple things simpler and hard things almost impossible. There are tons of libraries written in Python, but i haven't seen data about how efficient Python is for developing these libraries, as opposed to some languages with static typing. Less lines of code does not mean it is overall efficient. Look at code golf on Stack Overflow, they solve small but relatively complex problems there using programs written with 10-20 Unicode characters that are incomprehensible for most developers. Writing a program is about 10% of the effort, maintaining it is another 90%, and languages should be such that maintenance is easier. Maintenance is not 'figuring out what the program does'. That part is trivial, run it through debugger with single-stepping and you see what it does. Maintenance is like any other reverse engineering, where you try to 'figure out what the developer was thinking when they developed that program'. With the example above it is not possible to say for sure if somethingelse() was thought of being part of that condition block or not. You'd need to reverse engineer the entire algorithm in that function, then think if you'd do it in the same way, and if you disagree, you'd do it differently, probably introducing more bugs because you don't have any guidance about original thinking. There
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Syntactically Python is one of the worst languages that are developed recently. Maybe there are others like that, I don't know. This is one of the languages where 'nothing' matters, as in white spaces define the structure of the program. Code reviews are made almost impossible because instead of answering a question 'is the program structure as-is correct?' you need to answer a question 'which of all possible structures would be correct?'. Simple yes/no becomes 'design same program that you're reviewing on the spot and see if you come up with same result'. Example:
if (x)
something()
somethingelse()Should somethingelse() be indented like this? If that code is already indented by 5 levels, maybe somethingelse() needs to be pulled back one level? two? three? People can't indent properly in languages where indentation is not important (curly brace languages, for example), and you'd expect them to indent something correctly where it is important? The initial hype came by showing: look, it's simple, i type '2+3', it prints '5'. An over-glorified calculator. Next, they print 'hello world' and see on console 'hello world', and it only takes one line of code instead of 10. Great. It makes simple things simpler and hard things almost impossible. There are tons of libraries written in Python, but i haven't seen data about how efficient Python is for developing these libraries, as opposed to some languages with static typing. Less lines of code does not mean it is overall efficient. Look at code golf on Stack Overflow, they solve small but relatively complex problems there using programs written with 10-20 Unicode characters that are incomprehensible for most developers. Writing a program is about 10% of the effort, maintaining it is another 90%, and languages should be such that maintenance is easier. Maintenance is not 'figuring out what the program does'. That part is trivial, run it through debugger with single-stepping and you see what it does. Maintenance is like any other reverse engineering, where you try to 'figure out what the developer was thinking when they developed that program'. With the example above it is not possible to say for sure if somethingelse() was thought of being part of that condition block or not. You'd need to reverse engineer the entire algorithm in that function, then think if you'd do it in the same way, and if you disagree, you'd do it differently, probably introducing more bugs because you don't have any guidance about original thinking. There
atali wrote:
as in white spaces define the structure of the program.
Yeah, it takes a little bit to get used to, but not much more than the C# style of
if (foo)
{
}
else
{
}vs. the Javascript (and older C style, I think) style of:
if (foo) {
} else {
}Python at least uses colons, so you're example should be:
if (x):
something()Some FP languages (Haskell, Occam, F#) also use whitespace indentation, and once you get used to it, it's rather nice, IMO.
Latest Article - Class-less Coding - Minimalist C# and Why F# and Function Programming Has Some Advantages Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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atali wrote:
as in white spaces define the structure of the program.
Yeah, it takes a little bit to get used to, but not much more than the C# style of
if (foo)
{
}
else
{
}vs. the Javascript (and older C style, I think) style of:
if (foo) {
} else {
}Python at least uses colons, so you're example should be:
if (x):
something()Some FP languages (Haskell, Occam, F#) also use whitespace indentation, and once you get used to it, it's rather nice, IMO.
Latest Article - Class-less Coding - Minimalist C# and Why F# and Function Programming Has Some Advantages Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Anyone whose ambition is to be "an expert in X", is unlikely to make it. In my experience, the experts are the quiet people who get on with their work undisturbed by the surrounding noise. But when asked questions they always come up with excellent answers. I recall one specific individual who really knew the internals of a large OS inside out. When asked how he got to know so much his answer was, "practice, practice, practice".
First qualification an expert needs is to know he/she still has a lot to learn.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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Python can be quite impressive. To name a few things: 1) Huge 3rd party support and many very decent libraries, and some really interesting stuff, including things like AI, deep learning, etc. 2) IDE's - Visual Studio, JetBrains PyCharm, umm, Eclipse, including debugging 3) [Project Jupyter](http://jupyter.org/) is cool 4) It's usually more concise than C#. [Example](https://marcclifton.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/who-was-born-on-your-birthday/). 5) It can be impressive:
>>> 2**160
1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542976- Cross platform -- I develop UI's and custom SBC hardware controllers in Python, and can write and debug the code (mocking the hardware I/O) in Windows and test it, move it over to the Debian box, and it works. :) 7) Django for web hosting is actually cool and well thought out, more so than Ruby on Rails, IMO, but then I'm biased against anything Ruby. 8) Brain dead simple to interface to C code, and more importantly, to build the library that can be imported into your Python app. 9) Docker / container support is trivial. Interfacing with Docker using Python is trivial. 10) Ruby is dying. Thank God. 11) My experience with Ruby was entangled with experiences of egoistic developers, similar to what I experienced when Java was all the rage. With Python, the egoism seems to be considerably toned down. That's important to me because egoistic developers tend to be dangerous, biased, opinionated, arses to work with. And they're actually really bad coders too. Cons: 1) It's slow, of course, being interpreted 2) If you want speed, code it in C (I personally haven't tried Python with C++) 3) It's scripted. PyLint helps to catch many stupid typos and construct errors that a C# IDE would redline for you before you even hit Build. While I'm forced to deal with Javascript/HTML/CSS (believe it or not, I still have to get my toes wet with TypeScript or similar) and occasionally SQL, C# is my language/bias of choice, Python is my go-to language for SBC and container development. At some point I'll probably poke at Go. For a lot of things, it's quite decent but so is, for example, C#, unless you're doing something specific where the answer is "Python would make this soooo much easier."
Latest Article - Class-less Coding - Minimalist C# and Why F# and Function Programming Has Some Advantages Learning to