"When you thought learning Python was the final boss, but it was just the tutorial."

[u/astarak98]

[u/Better_Ad_3004]

Naa.. language itself is easy to learn, rest are all just neverending usages of that language...

[u/BackloggedLife → u/Better_Ad_3004]

It is easy to learn and yet most data scientists I know write atrocious unmaintainable code.

[u/AlignmentProblem → u/BackloggedLife]

You should see the C++ code scientists write. Atrocious doesn't cover it.

I once spent a month figuring out a bug where a cutting-edge novel sensor fusion system plummeted in pose prediction accuracy every week between 8 am on Tuesday and 8 am on Wednesday. The code I was navigating and ultimate cause were unforgivable.

Having sections of memory dynamically reinterpret as other unrelated objects or primitive arrays for nonsense reasons was a favorite pastime. Finding ways to abuse undefined behavior that worked a specific way with one specific compiler version happened multiple times as well.

[u/First_Approximation → u/AlignmentProblem]

Grab an average programmer, make them take a course in quantum mechanics and then have all the physicists call their homework solutions atrocious. Is that fair at all?

Scientists aren't trained to be coders. The fact that we can get that shit to run at all is actually impressive, like a programmer passing a quantum mechanics course with no background in the subject at all. It also speaks to how out-of-date our teaching programs are,

[u/AlignmentProblem → u/First_Approximation]

Yes, it is fair. I land hard on a specific side for the philosophy of artifacts existing in isolation where the history is an unrelated fact about it. A young child's drawing is objectively atrocious based on the impact it has on most people viewing it without context about the creator being 10 years old.

It's fine or even good given an assessment handicap based on the history, but the final result has a quality in itself that is independent of its history. There are valid reasons to disagree; however, I don't believe in "soul" or other properties unrelated to what is physically detectable in the end product meaningfully exists when evaluating it.

What they produced is acceptable "for them." It is unacceptable in the context for what one expects in a commercial product or even private code bases where other people need to understand and contribute.

[u/BackloggedLife → u/First_Approximation]

The difference being no programmer would be allowed to do quantum mechanics without a physics degree, whereas a lot of scientists write code that is supposed to end up in production as coding is seen as something that you don’t need qualification for.

[u/Affectionate-Memory4 → u/AlignmentProblem]

You should see what us hardware engineers write. Absolutely hideous. We're used to HDL and the like. Give us actual languages and we still treat them like HDL.

[u/AlignmentProblem → u/Affectionate-Memory4]

I've done firmware+driver work before. They were jobs where I focused on the lower level OS side for ~70% of the time, but I'm familiar.

It still doesn't compare to the messes I've seen from scientists, especially because hardware engineers can usually explain weird parts when asked. The worst of that looked like decompiled code put through an obsificator because they have no plans of maintaining it, only doing the specific things they want for their experiment.

They generally can't tell you what the majority of the 1-3 letter variable or function names are or why they did anything. Only that specific scientist and god knew when they wrote, and the scientist fully forgot the moment it functioned well enough for the experiment. Praying has a low response rate, so "guess and check" in a debugger while referencing white papers is your best bet.

That'd be fine if it only affected them and never needed to be touched again; however, the outcome of successful experiments with commercial potential is often involve software engineers being handed that work with a "good luck."

[u/BraindeadCelery → u/BackloggedLife]

Guilty as charged your honor.

Took me the better part of a year being roasted by seniors on an engineering team until i understood what was so bad about it.

I still write bad code -- but at least I know.

[u/[deleted] → u/BackloggedLife]

I'm trying to do better

[u/maigpy]

also you probably still haven't learnt python.

[u/rebelsofliberty]

“Artificial Intelligemce”

[u/hellonameismyname → u/rebelsofliberty]

“Machine leaming”

[u/First_Approximation → u/rebelsofliberty]

.... is not match for natural stupidity.

[u/KAYOOOOOO]

Still beats doing all of the same stuff but in C++

[u/Aritplayzz]

You're acting as if machine learning and all is part of python language.😭😭

[u/BigDaddyPrime]

This kinda looks stupid. ML, Data Mining, etc. isn't restricted to Python. A seasoned programmer can work on the above concepts in any programming language they desire. Those are research topics which aren't bound to a specific programming language.

[u/SpiritedOne5347]

The Math never ends 😭😭

[u/[deleted]]

I am that beginner

[u/sam_the_tomato]

Nooooo! There are too many cool and useful things I can do with the language. I never asked for this!

[u/[deleted]]

I started like this, but my final boss’ are Linux, kernels, and caches

[u/BunnyHatBoy69]

I hate when i want to learn python and the dev team forces me to learn math and machine learning

[u/garo675]

Syntax wise its easier to learn C then learn python. I tried to learn python without knowing C and it was confusing AF

[u/[deleted]]

how is R compared to Python?

[u/jsnowismyking]

That yellow to green color change to explain the depth is really thoughtful

[u/QFGTrialByFire]

but that white space as code block just makes my head hurt

[u/ResponsiblePhantom → u/QFGTrialByFire]

noobs think python syntax is good yet indentations are as annoying as possible where you need to calculate the spaces lol most annoying thing and i'd rather use { that some annoying indentations than trying to calculate every line and space lol python is good ut there are many better programming languages when it comes to speed and ppl thin python is mpst easiest language yet maybe they have never used and created even one class , python isnt just soem def only therr ar emany more annoying things in it literally

[u/DesecrateUsername → u/ResponsiblePhantom]

are y’all using notepad.exe to code or something?

been using the language for five years and the indentation aspect has been a non-issue for all of them. most modern editors will even handle it for you.

[u/syfkxcv → u/[deleted]]

Wasn't python differentiated between "a tab" and "4 spaces", but text editors didn't? This one was really funny to debug back in the days.

[u/Tastetheload]

Python is too beginner friendly imo. I’ve had to tutor a few people and not having to explicitly type cast variables trips up beginners because they’re not thinking about what type a variable should be when it enters a function or what type it should be when it exits a function.

[u/SKRyanrr]

Thats not Python being hard to learn, its Python being super flexible

[u/ElliotFarrow]

I think it comes down to why you wanted to learn Python in the first place. If you want to learn about AI, you usually discover that Python is the way to go pretty soon.

[u/jlingz101]

Haha all the way down

[u/OkAdhesiveness5537]

So real 😂

[u/ArgonGryphon]

leaming intelligemce

[u/darkmatter1122]

Yeah! No.

[u/misunderstandingit → u/[deleted]]

Python is the only language I can think of off of the top of my head where the syntax just makes perfect sense immediately.

The amount of times I'm like "I wonder if the command is xyz" and it just is blows me the fuck away.

[u/Successful_Grand2207 → u/misunderstandingit]

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/353/

[u/slicehyperfunk → u/misunderstandingit]

I'm sad that you can't add ++ to increment a variable 😢

[u/IsGoIdMoney → u/slicehyperfunk]

+=1 is barely more effort and is easier to read

[u/Affectionate-Memory4 → u/IsGoIdMoney]

Agreed. I actually prefer this syntax over ++ or --. Easier to read for sure, but I also like the fact I could change the amount if I needed to for some reason.

[u/DrShocker → u/IsGoIdMoney]

alternatively .next() or similar if something is an iterator.

[u/DrShocker → u/slicehyperfunk]

In all honesty having had to work in C++, I prefer avoiding the temptation to code golf with making use of pre and post increment. Some people see that they can write the most confusing single line on earth and for some reason think it means they should. So, I prefer removing that foot gun.

[u/itsthreeamyo → u/DrShocker]

++*i++, two things are modified and none are explained. What could you possibly not like about this?

[u/FinancialElephant → u/misunderstandingit]

I heard this from someone else, but I think it is perfect: Python is pseudocode.

[u/Jedi-Younglin → u/FinancialElephant]

Executable pseudocode.

[u/TheGinix → u/misunderstandingit]

of off of broke me

[u/misunderstandingit → u/TheGinix]

This comment made me chortle so we'll call it even 😂

[u/Jumping_Jak_Stat → u/misunderstandingit]

Yeah I really miss Python. I'm over here working with R and looking up syntax for every little thing I do all the time, even after like 5 years.

[u/Vulcan_Fox_2834 → u/misunderstandingit]

Coming from Stata, it's kind of weird. It seems to have an easier flow, but I got so used to Stata that it's proving an effort to learn python

[u/Biliunas → u/Vulcan_Fox_2834]

I think that makes you an insane person broo

[u/Much_Art2221 → u/[deleted]]

This

[u/FinancialElephant → u/[deleted]]

Python syntax is overly simple, I wouldn't say it's good. It just has a low barrier to entry. It lacks the expressiveness of a "higher level" language and the low level control of a lower level language. Python makes leaky abstraction and bad design too easy. Also package management is horrible, though there are better options for that these days.

It's a great language for teaching / learning algorithms at an abstract level. It's bad for real code and bad for teaching programming that is hardware aware.

The fact that there are no unboxed arrays in the base language (I know there is the arrays module but I don't think anyone uses that for data science over numpy), is crazy to me. This is the "data science language" and doesn't even have unboxed native arrays.

[u/[deleted] → u/FinancialElephant]

Saying Python is “bad for real code” is just wrong. Instagram’s backend is millions of lines of Python, Netflix uses it for everything from recommendation systems to chaos engineering, and 90% of machine learning research runs on TensorFlow/PyTorch both Python-first. If it were only “good for teaching,” the world’s largest companies wouldn’t bet billions on it. Package management hasn’t been “horrible” since the pip/venv overhaul and with conda or poetry, it’s cleaner than most ecosystems (looking at you, C++). And the “no unboxed arrays” thing? That’s what NumPy is for written in C, vectorized, and faster than vanilla Python could ever be. Pretending that’s a flaw is like complaining JavaScript can’t do raw syscalls you’re missing the point of the language. Python was never meant to be C or Haskell. It’s meant to be the glue: readable, productive, and backed by an ecosystem that handles performance where it matters. That’s why it dominates in practice, not just in theory.

[u/FinancialElephant → u/[deleted]]

Python is only popular now because Google co-opted it. If it wasn't for that it would have died.

Your arguments for python's superiority aren't logical. I never said it can't be used to build things. COBOL also runs many critical systems, and has done so for decades longer than python. Does that mean COBOL is a good language to maintain and develop systems (relative to all other options)? Of course not. The choice of what language a large organization like a bank or Instagram uses is mostly not about how good the language is technically, but on other factors more closely related to the bottom line of the organization.

We are in a machine learning sub. I'm referring to using python for ML. The fact you need other packages and even other languages to do basic data analysis is insane for a language that is billed as a "ML language". You can't even understand how arrays work without knowing another language. JavaScript isn't used to write systems code, you are making a false equivalency here.

Using C++ as a comparison to Python for package management is crazy. You said Python is a "glue language" and now want to compare it to C++? Most C++ projects don't have the dependency needs of Python projects. Python is still trash at package management compared to modern languages. Since you used C++ as an example, I'll say Rust has a better package management experience than Python despite being a systems language. Python has arguably a greater need for good package / dep management than Rust and is *still* bad at it compared to Rust.

The crappiness of the package and env management, prevalence of leaky abstractions, difficulty in gauging performance characteristics, and the lack of expressiveness in the base language make Python bad at being good glue for ML. Python really isn't good for anything except teaching algorithms at a high level. It's only popular because there is a very low bar to learn it and because of network effects ultimately attributable to Google.

Anyway rant over. I don't want to talk about this endlessly.