Python is Beautiful | Hacker News Reader

Python is Beautiful

mahdiyusuf.com

16 pointsgoogletron9 comments

I am a Python and JavaScript developer myself, recently getting into Go, but I took a look at Ruby not too long ago and was really impressed how beautiful Ruby code looked. I do not really have a reason to use Ruby, I feel like Python and JavaScript+node.js satisfy my scripting needs, but I wonder why Python seems to be so popular given how nice Ruby seemed. Just came around a little too late?

I remember trying Ruby out years ago and being turned off by a REPL I couldn't understand (Python's REPL was excellent) and a lot of Perlisms in the syntax (e.g: sigil support, regexps built-into syntax). Going back from indentation based syntax was also a minus.

More recently, when I looked at Ruby, I was somewhat turned off by the use of code blocks as a building block, rather than lexically scoped functions. I find functions simpler to compose and reason about than code-blocks, and found it peculiar that functions were expressed on top of blocks.

Why didn't you read the article? :)

There are a few more that a believed to be using Python in the backend Path and Turntable.fm

I'd have loved to see a link to the original allegation.

This is one of those nonsense things to me, as there is really very little tying the backend programming language to the presentation layer, except at the bottom, where people are still using the generic Django stylesheets and the like.

In short, that Instagram is pretty has nothing to do with it having been built in Python. It could even be that pretty if it were built in C, or Java, or even (gasp) ASP Classic.

This is exactly what I am trying to get at with the post; for him to say python applications are ugly is ridiculous. http://grokcode.com/746/dear-python-why-are-you-so-ugly/

I get it, but it feels like fighting nonsense with more nonsense though.

Regardless, while I'll grant that most of his assertions are at least true as presented, some of those are questionable - specifically, and maybe I'm the outlier, but I've always thought that the Heroku page was downright ugly, and I much prefer the AppEngine homepage.

Well the point is to combat the ideal that python applications are ugly. It may be nonsense but that isn't a prequisite in forming opinions in people's minds.

That, I 100% understand. I didn't mean to imply that somebody didn't need to respond, it just makes me sad that somebody did have to.

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