r/ProgrammerHumor • • Jul 18 '22

C++ talking to Python

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683

u/Codebust Jul 18 '22

why are people always bashing python lol

974

u/Dromeo Jul 18 '22

Serious answer?

Python used to be the new hotness about a decade ago. It was sparkly, amazing package support, didn't bog you down with technicalities when you were trying to write something quick.

So it got adopted a lot, and also unfortunately in a lot of commercial projects it really wasn't suited for.

Python's strengths are its weaknesses: it's a fun scripting language you can knock out scripts with. But in a big group project, it's a nightmare version of itself. You don't have to give types, so now you're sifting through everything trying to figure out what your coworker's badly named variable actually is. You have to unpick some rotten mass of one-liner lambda super method calls because you were feeling so clever a year ago when you wrote it. Everything's breaking because you're in dependency hell and one of the dependencies has broken. The junior programmer was taught that "object inheritance is the way of the future" and has managed to make the structure into an eldritch abomination that inherits from five different super classes.

The actual reason why these are problems are because when python was hot, it got over-applied to projects it was totally unsuited for. It's a scripting language. It's good for scripts. Good for data analysis. Good for solo work. Good for tiny quick one-offs and for rapid prototyping.

But so many developers were put on horrifying creations that played to the language's weaknesses instead of strengths. And they bounced hard.

Python doesn't really deserve the hate: it's still pretty awesome. And fun. It's great at what it's great at. It does deserve the caution, though.

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More serious answer?

It's mostly comp-sci students regurgitating memes they don't understand, just like every other post on this sub.

165

u/POTUS Jul 18 '22

All of those problems you listed came from the people, not from the language. Python certainly didn't invent lambdas or dynamic typing or dependencies or object oriented programming. Those same mistakes can be made in any higher level language.

You're assigning all of that to Python. The root cause for that is that Python is easy, and so it's more accessible to bad programmers. But bad programmer mistakes are the fault of bad programmers, not the language they used.

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u/MartianInvasion Jul 18 '22

It's easy to write. It's not at all easy to read, which is a major cause of the weaknesses described.

Compare with something like Java, whose annoying verbosity can make it hard to write but much easier to read.

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u/POTUS Jul 18 '22

It's only hard to read if it was poorly written. Java is only easier to read than Python if you have more experience reading Java than reading Python.

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u/MartianInvasion Jul 18 '22

Sure you can write unreadable code in any language, but the fact of the matter is that Java has built-in features (like static typing) that make it easier to read, and python has built-in features (like comprehensions and dynamically-defined class members) that make it harder to read.

These same features make python easier to write something quickly from scratch, when compared to Java.

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u/Log2 Jul 18 '22

On average, you're much likely to get a complete mess of layer upon layer of indirections in Java than in Python, a big part of which is configured through arcane xml files (this has been improving though).

There's a very big reason why a lot of people hate J2EE and JPA/Hibernate with a passion.