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If you have the time, I'd love to hear you elaborate. So far most people whose opinion I value have only said good things about Python. You're the first person whose opinion I respect to go against that. regards, --ropers
You just need to talk to more people, then. Lots of people don't like Python. Same for Perl, Ruby, or anything else. I've heard several devs say they don't like Python but I have yet to hear any of them actually give a reason. Ask them why they don't like C++ and you get a big list of everything that's wrong with it. Ask about Python and you get "it sucks" or "it's awful" or something. So I think it's just a matter of taste. Or maybe Henning has actual reasons. I haven't heard him talk about Python before so I don't know. Henning? -- Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG dwchandler@stilyagin.com | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation
Ugh, a programming language where you can't copy paste from xterm to xterm without fucking up the program is just way to much pain to work on. The indenting of code is an optical help but should not change the behaviour of the program. For me it is important to be able to write code with style(9) in mind (and I think most other BSD developpers think similar because our code all looks similar).
I have often done copy/paste with Python code between xterms. Of course you must fix indenting. If you naively copy/paste C you will also have issues of syntax and meaning, but if you are so used to looking at C code that the meaning in the new context is immediately obvious without thinking then you will not notice. Instead you just fix/adjust it in place and move on. Some people will never like indent having meaning. But there is value in having an 'else' that *looks* like it belongs with an 'if' actually belong to that 'if', *because* it looks like it does. You don't ever have to like Python, but indenting to make blocks is perfectly cromulent. It's not a deficiency, it's just different. -- Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG dwchandler@stilyagin.com | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation
It's very hard to fix the indenting when you're copying code from a web forum/email archive/whatnot that mangled it. Been there done that. Pythons behavior in this regard makes it very aggravating to work with as a newcomer, and for many people who are a little suspicious of the whole whitespace thing, when your first taste of the language is hours spent fixing the whitespace, you aren't inclined to use it any more than necessary. On Dec 19, 2009, at 9:21 AM, Darrin Chandler
I agree that copy/paste from the web would be challenging for newcomers. Pastes from the web do horrible things to indenting. If you aren't comfortable with Python it'd be a huge pain. -- Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG dwchandler@stilyagin.com | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation
Well, enforced whitespaces are a double-edges sword: While enforcing newcomes to indent their code correctly and thus getting them used to the right style and avoiding bad behaviour, it is really a pain in the ass for testing. If you are just going to test something, you often have to reindent code. Luckily, vim can do that for you, but still, it's rather annoying that I have to reformat the code then. -- Jonathan [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]
You're doing testing wrong and the wrongness has nothing to do with python. ;-) -- Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG dwchandler@stilyagin.com | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation
Erm, since when is it wrong to change code for testing, to make sure it even works under strange circumstances? oO -- Jonathan [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]
When you can write your code to remain testable. If you've changed code, then you're only testing test code instead of production code. If you change it back for production, did you change it back correctly? Better to call the same code from both production and testing. Yes, I have used your approach. I only use that approach when I must. -- Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG dwchandler@stilyagin.com | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation
I'm more talking about debugging here. It's awfully annoying to change indentation for that. And yes, I don't commit my debug code by accident, as I always read the diff first ;). -- Jonathan
I agree that copy/paste is a big problem in Python. But in my experience copy/paste of code in any language is dangerous. If you want to re-use code, write a function. -- Floor Terra <floort@gmail.com> www: http://brobding.mine.nu/
[ ] you have ever seriously used C heck, even perl. -- Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting
In my experience (mostly python and c), code that has been pasted has a higher bug density. This is because most of the copy/paste goes like this: 1) Write some loop 2) Need similar loop 3) copy/paste old loop 4) Modify pasted loop (but forget one tiny change) 5) New loop has bug It's worse with Python because of the indentation (tabs vs. spaces), but as a general rule I would say never copy/paste code. -- Floor Terra <floort@gmail.com> www: http://brobding.mine.nu/
This is why I never just copy code, but type it. While you type, you also think about whether it makes sense to just copy the code and you will notice if you have to adjust something. Saved me quite a few times and doesn't take too long if you copy only short code. And long code should never be copied anyway. -- Jonathan [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]
boo hoo. there are very valid uses of copied code, or extremely similiar code (copy & paste and change a few things). we have that many times in the tree. the enforced indentation is completely nuts. i purposefully indent extremely incorrectly when adding debug code that i intend to remove again, to spot it faster. just one example, there are many more. python doesn't solve a problem. perl's been there already. oh, and the 80s sed, i use it a lot. as well as shell scripts. -- Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting
If you're copying and pasting, you're probably doing something wrong. If it's a small example that you're using as a tutorial or as inspiration to understand how something works, you probably should type it. By typing it the information makes another pass through your brain which can improve comprehension. If it's large and part of something functional, it should have been in a tarball or under source control and there shouldn't be any copy/paste. If your coding style involves a lot of copy and paste, you're repeating yourself and probably should not do that. With that said my python grumbles have been. 1) Developers that refuse to understand the packaging utilities available and how they work with source control systems. 2) Packaging libraries that were written with CVS and subversion in mind that completely break on current versions of subversion. 3) Inattention to detail in libraries. IE the python ldap libraries where results can be retrieved without a message id, but an exception -- Chris Dukes
and just to add to the pyre... Your losses then. Python isn't so much a language of recipes, it's a language of ideas. Python is about thinking about what you're doing. It's one of those languages that forces you to work on a higher level (not that there aren't lots of places where python is used as a scripting language--that code tends to come out badly, but that's because it's written just to get the job done). Ideal code is abstracted code, what possible use does repeating yourself in the tree have? I know drivers have to declare a common set of globals and make some macro calls and various entry-points are found by sticking to a naming scheme, but that's trivia, hardly enough to justify "valid uses for copied code". Anytime I find myself wanting to copy some code it's always meant I've stumbled over an abstraction I haven't made yet, so what in the world is src/ doing that -requires- copied code? -Nick
I must disagree here... there's nothing about *any* programming language [1] that forces one to work on a higher level. That's up to the programmer. I've seen even the simplest tasks, or ones that scream for a nice, simple abstraction, done horribly (if at all) in any language, including python. My experience grading countless programs from freshman-senior students, which are increasingly written in python, show it's not the programming language... it's the programmer. Good design + good coding practices + tons-o-work forces one to think more and come up with a better design, not the language. -ryan [1] except of course for Haskell, the ONE TRUE GOD of proper programming :P
There is no limit to shit code produced by amateurs and "professionals". Really? then why do you use scrotwm?
Because it kicks the balls out of every other wm.
Out of this whole thread this is the only statement I agree with completely.
Because I'm a slacker.
Because 1) that was a joke/jab at the Haskell folks, who often make similar claims about Haskell, and 2) William Boshuck already put it best.
Yeah, we C-programmers are just mastrubating monkeys poking the typewrite till it produces compiling code. If you don't think about what your doing you get the crap code you see everywhere and it is not depending on the Code abstraction is nice until you have to update a vendor driver or some other highly abstracted nightmare. Been there, done that, got the nightmares. Sometimes it is far better to copy a few lines instead of abstracting an interface until it is unusable. No programming language will redeem people from thinking and designing their projects correctly.
I should make it more clear what I was saying: knowing the basics of python can't force you to write good code (in fact the python stdlib is full of shitty shitty code--the web stuff is particularly terrible) but there's something about working in it that lets me approach problems in a different way then I would have otherwise. (of course the near-ultimate end of this line of thinking is lisp, where you can define syntax for any construct you want to abstract, but lisp personally I find lisp too wordy--that's just me though) And I didn't mean "abstracting" in the way that C++/Java people mean it. I've fought tooth and nail against indirection in the name of "simplification" before. Come on. On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Darrin Chandler I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that scripting people wrote bad Ideas as in the structure of the program, not as in "communication". Yes you can write any data/dependency/etc structure in any language, but some languages let you do it easier, and I've found python to be Yeah yeah, I would trust that there's abstraction in the tree (more in OpenBSD than most), but I didn't know why you wouldn't always try to make the smallest code. I hadn't thought about execution time, it's true, but even then I would think it's better to define a template and fill in the blanks somehow instead of copy-pasting. Anyway, enough /noise/, I can see that this is just going to end with misunderstood words. -Nick
Oh my. A language of ideas should mean that ideas are concisely expressible in code, and that reading the code should convey the meaning. So you see an idea on the web somewhere and paste the idea into your code and it's broken? Idea fail! Python is regularly used by myself and others for scripting and it comes out just fine. Sometimes I work at a higher level and other times not, as the situation calls for. Doing things The UNIX Way(tm) means some programs are simple filters that do not benefit from large numbers of abstraction layers. Far from forcing me, Python allows me to write in Oh my. Python didn't invent abstraction. There's a lot of abstraction in the tree, you know, in plain old C. Some kinds of abstraction are easier in some languages, but there are often trade-offs. How many times per second does an ethernet driver get called when there's a lot of traffic? Really, Python doesn't paste well from the web and this can be a problem for newbies. This isn't about Python being a language of ideas, it's about Python choosing indent as meaningful and how sucky copying from a web page is in practice. Meaningful indent works really, REALLY well when writing python or reading python, but it sucks bad in this one instance. Not because Python sucks, but because embedding code in forum posts sucks. Tough cookies for python, because that's the shape of the world right now. -- Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG dwchandler@stilyagin.com | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation
python sucks because people think it's great. ever try to port a program written in C that uses Scons as it's build system? for me, the C is easy, fixing the damn Scons (python) build scripts is a *royal PITA*. autohell sucks but at least it uses old school UNIX tools as it's backend (shell, awk, sed, perl). -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
Bwahahahahaha! ok that is the funniest thing I heard in a couple of So when I am writing some sort of wire protocol I am not thinking about Abstracted code is usually gratuitously complex for no other reason than abstraction. Abstraction is useful when used in its problem domain. It
It's religion. The python followers say the same about perl. :-) Best Martin
The rules for scoping are utterly fucked.
