Python needs an actual default function
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I don't understand. What do you mean by deciding what the code should do in the context of language design? Can you give a concrete example? I am confused because the "main" function is required when you make an executable. Otherwise, a library will not contain any main function and we could compile it just fine no? (Shared library)
Python is an interpreted language that doesn't need a main function explicitly. You can define any package entry points you want at the package config level. (setup.py, etc)
example:
What I meant was I prefer language that treat developers like adults. If I want ptrhon's "ux" to hide some functions or objects I can do that with underscores, but nothing is private, a developer using my library can do whatever they want with it, access whatever internals they want (at their own risk of course) -
What's the difference between a "scripting" language and a "real" one?
Scripting languages are real. Generally people consider dynamic languages scripting languages but it's not that simple.
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Not having tons of code in one if statement, but in a function.
I thought you were saying to literally use
def main(): pass, that’s why I was confused -
Unix shell scripts are one of the few holdouts.
I don't know if this applies to other shells, but bash will not only execute your script line-by-line, it will also read it line-by-line. Which means that you can modify the behavior of a running script by editing lines that have not yet been executed*. It's absolutely bonkers, and I'm sure that it has caused more than one system failure, during upgrades.
* For example, if you run the following script
echo "hello" sleep 5 echo "goodbye"and then edit the third line before the 5 second sleep has elapsed, then the modified line will be executed.
I have run into the problem of modifying a bash script while it is running.
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Python doesn't need the name main check to function at all. that's just a convenience feature that lets developers also include arbitrary entry points into modules that are part of a library and expected to be used as such. If you're writing a script, a file with a single line in it reading
print("hello world")will work fine when run:python thescript.pywrote on last edited by [email protected]Yes, because
In the first kind of language, the thought process is basically: I have the flow of execution, starting at the top of the file. If I want to make a library, I should build the things I want to build, then get out of the way.
Note the "I have the flow of execution", and the "if I want to build a library".
If you just want to build an executable, do as you wish, you already have the flow of execution.
If you want to build a library, make the relevant classes and functions and get out of the way (i.e., no IO, no long-running tasks).
If you want to combine them, use the main name check - or, make a package and do entry points that way. Either way works, because both can fulfill the goal of staying out of the way of those importing this as a library.
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Agreed. I program mainly in C so its easier for me to make sense of bad C code than bad python code which just makes me cry
Does Lua rank far below python for you? I have so much rage against it. At least with Python I don't have to do a bunch of steps to just get it to do something. May take me a while to get through bad Python code, but Lua makes my eyes bleed and I begin to regret my life choices in trying to understand wtf these people wrote.
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Also, do y'all call main() in the if block or do you just put the code you want to run in the if block?
The if block is where my arg parser goes
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As much as I am inclined to agree with this, still can't
see: LISP
Also, see: Python with more than three lines of logic. I could suspect that's just the me-versus-whitespaces thing, but no, YAML files do not get me dizzy in under thirty seconds of reading. Van Rossum made a huge miscalculation here
Everyone's welcome to their opinion of course, but I find Python more readable than anything else and I resent the visual clutter required to make intentions plain in other languages. Feels like having a conversation where people say the words "comma", "period", etc.
I also spend more time with Python than anything else and I suspect these two facts about me relate, lol
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What's the difference between a "scripting" language and a "real" one?
A scripting language controls an existing binary. A non-scripting language is used to create a new binary.
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Also, do y'all call main() in the if block or do you just put the code you want to run in the if block?
main.pyor did you not read the manual? -
Also, do y'all call main() in the if block or do you just put the code you want to run in the if block?
Depends on how lazy I am at the moment.
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I intended this an sarcastic example; I think it's worse than putting the main outside of the branch because of the extra indent-level. It does have an upside that the
main()doesn't exist if you try import this as an module.I thought confusion about indent levels was the whole point of using python
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Everyone's welcome to their opinion of course, but I find Python more readable than anything else and I resent the visual clutter required to make intentions plain in other languages. Feels like having a conversation where people say the words "comma", "period", etc.
I also spend more time with Python than anything else and I suspect these two facts about me relate, lol
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Someone should get their hands on someone like me and someone like you and study their brains. I spend most time with PHP and C++, and Python looks like an attempt to write code like prose literature. Very interesting how much of this is habbit, as it can't be just that: reading prose and poetry in English/Russian/Japanese never produced this kind of resentment
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I thought you were saying to literally use
def main(): pass, that’s why I was confusedOh, no, that's just the usual placeholder. Though, ... would also be valid iirc, and would fit better as a "TODO" placeholder
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Also, do y'all call main() in the if block or do you just put the code you want to run in the if block?
I've always found needing to manually add a class instance parameter (i.e.
self) to every object method really weird. And the constructors being named__init__. Not having multiple dispatch is kinda annoying too. Needing to use decorators for class methods, static methods, and abstract classes is also annoying. Now that I think about it, Python kinda sucks (even though it's the language I use the most, lol). -
I feel that Python is a bit of a 'Microsoft Word' of languages. Your own scripts are obviously completely fine, using a sensible and pragmatic selection of the language features in a robust fashion, but everyone else's are absurd collections of hacks that fall to pieces at the first modification.
To an extent, 'other people's C++ / Bash scripts' have the same problem. I'm usually okay with 'other people's Java', which to me is one of the big selling points of the language - the slight wordiness and lack of 'really stupid shit' makes collaboration easier.
Now, a Python script that's more than about two pages long? That makes me question its utility. The 'duck typing' everywhere makes any code that you can't 'keep in your head' very difficult to reason about.
other people's Java
I'm gonna have to disagree here, it's always a guessing game of how many layers of abstraction they've used to seemingly avoid writing any implementation code... Can't put the code related to "bicycles" in the
Bicycleclass, no, that obviously goes inWheeledDeviceServiceFactoryBeanImplthat's in the 'utils' package. -
other people's Java
I'm gonna have to disagree here, it's always a guessing game of how many layers of abstraction they've used to seemingly avoid writing any implementation code... Can't put the code related to "bicycles" in the
Bicycleclass, no, that obviously goes inWheeledDeviceServiceFactoryBeanImplthat's in the 'utils' package.Enough of that crazy talk - plainly
WheeledDeviceServiceFactoryBeanImplis where the dependency injection annotations are placed. If you can decide what the code does without stepping through it with a debugger, and any backtrace doesn't have at least two hundred lines of Spring boot, then plainly it isn't enterprise enough.Fair enough, though. You can write stupid overly-abstract shit in any language, but Java does encourage it.
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Well now. My primary exposure to Go would be using it to take first place in my company's 'Advent of Code' several years ago, in order to see what it was like, after which I've been pleased never to have to use it again. Some of our teams have used it to provide microservices - REST APIs that do database queries, some lightweight logic, and conversion to and from JSON - and my experience of working with that is that they've inexplicably managed to scatter all the logic among dozens of files, for what might be done with 80 lines of Python. I suspect the problem in that case is the developers, though.
It has some good aspects - I like how easy it is to do a static build that can be deployed in a container.
The actual language itself I find fairly abominable. The lack of exceptions means that error handling is all through everything, and not necessarily any better than other modern languages. The lack of overloads means that you'll have multiple definitions of eg.
Math.mincluttering things up. I don't think the container classes are particularly good. The implementation of pointers seems solely implemented to let you have null pointer exceptions, it's a pointless wart.If what you're wanting to code is the kind of thing that Google do, in the exact same way that Google do it, and you have a team of hipsters who all know how it works, then it may be a fine choice. Otherwise I would probably recommend using something else.
I'm now 1 year in to working in Go having been mostly C++ and then mostly large-scale Python dev (with full type annotation).
Frankly, I bristle now at people giving Python a hard time, having worked with Go and I now hate Go and the de-facto ethos that surrounds it. Python may be slow, but for a lot of use cases not in any way that matters and modern computers are very fast. Many problem areas are not performance-limited, and many performance problems are algorithmic, not from raw statement execution. I even rewrote an entire system in Python and made it use 20% of the CPU the former C++ solution used, while having much more functionality.
The error returns drive me nuts. I looked around for explanations of the reasoning as I wasn't seeing it, and only found bald assertions that exceptions get out of control and somehow error returns don't. Meanwhile standard Go code is very awkward to read because almost every little trivial function calls becomes 4 lines of code, often to do nothing but propagate the error (and errors are just ignored if you forget...). With heavy use of context managers, my error and cancellation handling in Python was always clean, clear, and simple, with code that almost read like whiteboard pseudo-code.
The
selectstatement can be cool in Go, but then you realize that literally 98% of the times it's used, it's simply boilerplate code to (verbosely) handle cancellation semantics via the context object you have to pass everywhere. Again, literally code you just don't need in exception-based languages with good structures to manage it like Python context managers.And every time you think "this is stupidly awkward and verbose, surely there's a cleaner way to do this" you find people online advocating writing the same boilerplate code and passing it off as a virtue. e.g. get a value from a map and fall back to a default if it's not there? Nope, not offering that, so everyone must write their own
if foo, ok := m[k]; !ok {...}crap. Over and over and over again the answer is "just copy this chunk of code" rather than "standard libraries should provide these commonly needed utilities". Of course we can do anything we want ourselves, it's Turing Complete, but why would we want to perpetually reinvent these wheels?It's an unpopular language, becoming less popular (at least by Google trends) and for good reason. I can see it working well for a narrow set of low level activities with extreme concurrency performance needs, but it's not the only language that could handle that, and for everything else, I think it's the wrong choice.
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Does everyone call the function of the script main? I never use main(), just call the function what the program is supposed to do, this program calculates the IBNR? The function is called calculate_IBNR(), then at the end of the script if name = 'main': calculate_IBNR(test_params) to test de script, then is imported into a tkinter script to be converter to an exe with pyinstaller
All of mine are called
do_thing()because after a few days of working on it, the scope creep always means the original name was wrong anyway. -
I've always found needing to manually add a class instance parameter (i.e.
self) to every object method really weird. And the constructors being named__init__. Not having multiple dispatch is kinda annoying too. Needing to use decorators for class methods, static methods, and abstract classes is also annoying. Now that I think about it, Python kinda sucks (even though it's the language I use the most, lol).Nah
selfis quite important. The main part of a method is to access the state of the object.selfis just the interface to it.
