Comment by boberoni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boberoni | Hacker News Reader

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> Python has a great/dope community

Python's community is one of the greatest and worst parts of the language. Python might not be the best language for anything, but it's the second best language for everything.

I've dabbled in many programming languages, a lot of which are backed by a single large company or consultancy:

- Java (Oracle, at least initially)

- TypeScript, C# (Microsoft)

- Golang, Dart (Google)

- Elixir (Nubank)

- Clojure (Cognitect)

- Kotlin (JetBrains)

- Objective-C, Swift (Apple)

- Julia (Julia Computing)

Then, there are languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Rust, etc. that are more diversified and distributed in terms of core contributors, maintainers, and evangelists. Meanwhile, there's a long list of other lesser known languages that have failed to grow a community as large as Python's.

As I get older and older, I have realized that our programming languages are not static entities, but they change and evolve over time. They are influenced by users, companies, and researchers. I hope that one day, there's a humanities subject that studies programming languages just like we study natural languages like in linguistics. The closest thing right now seems to be history of science, but it's quite a broad field.

> Python's community is one of the greatest and worst parts of the language.

If you come from a Ruby background, and you are now doing Python, you may find yourself on Stackoverflow looking up how to do X idomatically in Python (something you did all the time in Ruby). Or you may ask colleagues who know Python but do not know Ruby.

A common answer from the Pythonista community is, "Why would you ever want to do that?" (or Why would you need that?)

Ternary operators? Who needs that. Ok sure, here, but let's make it awkward. Where did Python get the model to do "x = 1 if y else 2"? But ironically, unlike Ruby where you can say "x = 1 if y", in Python you cannot do that. Oh, but you cannot say "x = 1 if y else return". That's not allowed.

Python has finally, as of 3.10, added a switch statement. This is something that many other languages have had for ages. You should see the contortions people have gone to to approximate a switch statement in Python... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60208/replacements-for-s...

The Python community may have some good, helpful, and friendly people; but most programming communities have that. That is not a plus for any language, because it should be a given.

I'm not a Pythonista by any means, but these complaints are banal. Ternary operators? Plenty of new popular languages don't have a ternery operator (Go, Rust, Elixir, Kotlin, Nim).

My list of python gripes are long, but language constructs are not on the list.

The point is about inconsistency.

You can say "x = 1 if expr else 2", but you cannot say "x = 1 if expr". You do a two line

if expr:

    x = 1

You cannot say "x = 1 if expr else return".

[1] is a list with one item, 1.

{1} is a set with one item, 1.

(1) is a number, 1, with pointless parenthesis. Perhaps you mean (1,), a tuple containing only one value.

Or how about mutable default values in function paramters? That makes a lot of sense...

I don't need to keep offering examples. You can search the internet and find many places where people list the warts, inconsistencies, and misfeatures of Python.

These are pointless nitpicks. Every language has things like this. In 4 years of using Python in anger I’ve never written a line of code that could be improved by the features you list.

> These are pointless nitpicks. Every language has things like this. In 4 years of using Python in anger I’ve never written a line of code that could be improved by the features you list.

This is exactly the kind of response one often hears from the Python community. Translated it means, "I'm ok with it this way, so who cares if it could be better?"

> You can say "x = 1 if expr else 2", but you cannot say "x = 1 if expr". You do a two line

This one liner works:

    if expr: x = 1

> Or how about mutable default values in function paramters? That makes a lot of sense...

This can be helpful under certain circumstances (e.g. memoization) [1]. The linked article also points out that it can be useful for rebinding global names in optimized code.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1145781

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200221224620id_/http://effbot....

> if expr: x = 1

But PEP8 and now the all-too-popular Black formatter disallow this. I think it's fine.

The momoization/optimization point is exactly the opposite of what should be a default use case for a beginner friendly language. And I highly doubt this mutable default design was intentional for these purposes. They are footguns.

Java is one of the few languages that actually has a specification and multiple, very different implementations. So I don't believe it is fair to call out it as being backed by a single company (even though in practise Oracle is indeed the one doing the most work on the platform, and they are doing a spectacular work at that). Even if Oracle would disappear tomorrow, Java has enough usage by many huge companies that the platform wouldn't even skip a beat.

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