I used to like Python in the 2010s when it felt like a breath of fresh air relative to PHP and Perl.
Now it feels like a weird PHP itself that is slow, brittle, and dangerous to write code at scale in.
The loose typing, potluck standard library, and horrible package manager (insofar as the community does not know how to package code) all feel so dated.
I don't understand how people talk about how Python is "easy to learn for beginners" or "easy to understand." To me it's so hard to remember and follow all the weirdness. Racket / Scheme / I dare say even Haskell would just be so much simpler for learners.
I'm with Conal Elliot when he said on Type Theory for All that it is sooo much harder to understand a program in Python.
Python certainly has some baggage, especially the typing system (which is still not finished, if you're looking at static typing and so is implemented differently by type checkers) and pip's safety, or lack thereof. But comparing it to PHP or Perl is rhetoric leading you one step too far.
Past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49284392 (with my comment), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250370 .
Nice to see it get attention this time.
Isn't "..." then also behaving like True, False and None, i.e. being a lexical token that rewolves to a hardwired value during parsing?
It is, but Ellipsis is just an ordinary pre-defined constant (with the same value).
I used to like Python in the 2010s when it felt like a breath of fresh air relative to PHP and Perl.
Now it feels like a weird PHP itself that is slow, brittle, and dangerous to write code at scale in.
The loose typing, potluck standard library, and horrible package manager (insofar as the community does not know how to package code) all feel so dated.
I don't understand how people talk about how Python is "easy to learn for beginners" or "easy to understand." To me it's so hard to remember and follow all the weirdness. Racket / Scheme / I dare say even Haskell would just be so much simpler for learners.
I'm with Conal Elliot when he said on Type Theory for All that it is sooo much harder to understand a program in Python.
It is 30+ years old with all the baggage you would expect. It’s very much a product of its time.
It’s not like that cannot be changed. Look at PHP, which managed to evolve brilliantly over the last decade and gets tons of things right now.
Python certainly has some baggage, especially the typing system (which is still not finished, if you're looking at static typing and so is implemented differently by type checkers) and pip's safety, or lack thereof. But comparing it to PHP or Perl is rhetoric leading you one step too far.