I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

[thedigitalengel]

I don't like Python.

I love C. I like C++ too. I used to write a lot of Java when I was a kid (as in high-school kid) but now that I've written quite a bit of C and C++, Java seems more like a toy language. I did enjoy Java back then, however. I yet to do any major work in C#, but it seems to be a powerful language, especially when handling certain kinds of complexity.

I've been learning LISP on weekends for two weekends now, and I find it interesting. I know little bits of Haskell (am planning to learn it later this year) and seem to like it too. Maybe I like the idea of liking Haskell, I'll know for sure once I actually start writing Haskell.

Coming back to the point - I don't like Python. I've never liked it. I've tried working on various Python projects but have always found some or the other excuse to prematurely back out. And mind you, I love coding - I spend most of my time writing code or learning new stuff about code.

My question to the hardcore python lovers is this (and mind you, by hardcore I mean the kind of people who wrote Exaile, not the kind who hack up a Python script every now and then to organize their iPod): No doubt many of you have come from C / C++ / LISP backgrounds. What is the paradigm shift you experienced? I look at a piece of C code in a certain way - how do I look at a piece of Python code? How do I think about Python? How do I think in Python (copied that one from Bruce Eckel)?

[amix]

Yesterday there was an interesting link on HN comparing NLP in Python vs. other languages: http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/howto/nlp-python.ht.... I think this article shows the clearness of the Python language - - and this clearness and simplicity is the reason why I love to code in Python.

[nudge]

This is the main draw for me. Compared to Python, other languages (well, some) seem to require you to do so many things that just seem... unnecessary.

I couldn't believe all the junk Java required of me when I took a stab at it. It's like being confronted with some unhelpful bureaucrat: I know what I mean, they know what I mean, but they're damn well going to make me trudge through all the nonsense so that what I mean is turned into something the bureaucracy understands. The linked NLP examples are great for illustrating this.

[grasshoper]

Python for me is the language closest to pseudocode. There are no decorations and few gimmicks. You simply write your ideas down into code.

[thedigitalengel]

I agree that short python samples are as clear as a high level language can possibly be. Implementing algorithms, for instance, becomes incredibly easy in Python. I face problems when Python programs get above a certain length.

I've done some Django programming in the past. A view gets a request object (pardon me if I'm wrong or if this has changed recently) and is supposed to then render the response (or something similar, I don't remember exactly). Now what is a request? If Django were in C, I would know what a request object really was, grep for it, and look up the header file. If request has a GHashTable named post_data, I don't think I need two guesses about what it exactly is. Same goes for C++ and C#.

Then you've inconsistencies. The same method may return a string object or an integer on different calls. And this happens in practice - I remember when I was (trying to) model a relational database in Django, I found a ManyToMany field returning (when invoking values ()) a list of dictionaries instead of a list of Model objects (which I was expecting).

Of course, if I was not dumb enough to not read the documentation I might not have stumbled; but the point is that Python allows this to happen. And since I don't have the benefits of a compiler, anything other than basic syntax errors (the ones I can catch by calling py.compile) explode at runtime.

The thing I've begun to notice that scripting languages tend to require you to hold the entire structure of the program in your head as you code. In C++ you know that unless you've gone out of your way to do some casting magic, a string get_foo () will always return a string. And you can always do get_foo ().c_str (). In python you're never sure.

[carbon8]

The ruby examples don't behave the same as the python version since they use ARGF in place of stdin. They are also non-idiomatic. Here is a correct, idiomatic Ruby version:

    $stdin.read.split.each do |w|
      puts w if w.match(/ing$/)
    end

or as a single 57 column line:

    $stdin.read.split.each { |w| puts w if w.match(/ing$/) }

we can also use the match operator:

    $stdin.read.split.each { |w| puts w if w =~ /ing$/ }

I'm inclined to assume that the other language examples are also suspect.

[phsoftnet]

Why doesn't anyone ever mention my favorite language, Tcl?

foreach line [read stdin] { foreach word [split $line] { if [string match *ing $word] { puts $word } } }

[donw]

Don't know why, but I feel the need to contribute a shorter Ruby sample that feels closer to conventional Ruby. :)

ARGF.lines.each { |line| line.split.each { |word| word.match(/ing$/) and puts word } }

[gte910h]

I'm a guy from a C/C++ background who did linux kernel development, and picked up python along the way and used it to do desktop tools. I used python (without knowing any of it) to write a disassembler for a project I was doing in 2003 on a non-x86 processor. It took me 5 days to learn the language enough to do so and to write the entire tool, at which point I "got it".

First off, Java isn't a toy language. You've characterized it improperly. Java is a bureaucratic language. You have to cross your t's dot your i's, fill out your requests in triplicate at the FactoryFactoryFactory to get the objectOfYourDesire. Why is this so?

This comes back to how C++ works on projects, especially large projects and midsize projects with a couple mediocre programmers thrown in (because, in commercial software development, you rarely get control of your team). C++ does not work well for large team development unless 1> You have very capable people 2> and you can fire everyone who steps outside the "defined okay subset" of C++ you use on the project. The language is too big, certain parts make it too uncertain, etc, for people to just willy nilly use all the language features. So Java, is basically Sun's "redoing" of C++ where they took its wild west nature, and made a BureauDisney version where you can't do a dozen things that happens in C++ all the time when good programmers go off the reservation or bad programmers enter the equation at all.

C++ has uses, but it's the sulfuric acid of programming languages: you have to have good personnel control and fire those who screw around outside the boundaries of the right style. A programming group with one guy programming like C with classes and another guy programming like it's Ocaml without garbage collection, and you're in for a mighty piece of hell.

So that's where Java came from. That's why it is what it is, and I hope I've highlighted a non-business issue with C++ that comes up from it's overabundance of "understanding breaking powers" which don't mess well with total programmer freedom.

Now lets look at what python was, and what it is now: Python was originally designed as a substitute for the pascal/BASIC line of programming languages (specifically a language called ABC). It was designed to be very very clear. It still is very very clear. It is still quite terse compared with C++/Java/C, but it's wordier than perl and ruby, but very much clearer for even non-python programmers to decipher much of the time.

Over time, it grew into an Application development and webserver development language. Why?

It has a very easy way to interface to C code. This is important, because C does great module level integration, but once you get at the system level, you start to get issues with namespaces, tracing bugs, etc. So python became an alternative for tying C code together.

It writes very quickly. While you may not understand how to write it quickly yet, usually python/ruby/perl will be quite a bit more productive on a feature basis than Java/C#, and tons more productive than an equivalent C/C++ project. This has to do with the fact it takes very few lines of these languages to "do a job".

For you currently, you're possibly less productive in python right now than you are in C++; I've honestly found this doesn't hold true more than 40-80 hours into learning python development while doing a real project for almost anyone who can handle commercial C++ software development. The C++ people do python faster than they do C++ and it has many fewer issues in the end than C++ they would have wrote. We use weave.inline or something else to speed up the inner loops with some native C, if even required for that application, and all is good, it works just as fast for the user or application, and was completed much faster with much less obtuse bugs.

If you spend those 40-80 hours on the language, you too will likely be a faster developer in python than C++ for many features.

Some tips: You are not doing C, you are not doing C++, you are not doing Java. Don't pretend you have to do the bueracracy that those languages require. If you write a python program with absolutely no functions, it will run just fine. So if all you need to do is process a small amount of text or open a little server, you can do this in a flat file with just a series of lines of code striaght out of main() in a C program. However with the size and completeness of the python standard library, you'll rarely have to write the rest of the functions.

Secondly, it's important to learn idomatic python today. If you write things like "it's supposed to be" in python today, you get speed on par with C/Java (or only 3-5x slower), and it's really freaky to see an interpreted language do that.

Thirdly, it's important to learn and use the standard language rather than writing code. Python module of the week blog is a great resource to do this: http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/PyMOTW/ Much of python's power comes from a stupidly complete standard library that does much of what you need to do so allows you to write 20 line programs.

Lastly, learn easy ways to fall back on C/C++ in python. This way when you use python for an application it turns out it's too slow for, you can still add a bit of C/C++ to get the speed you need. You can embed C++ inline and have it compiled on the fly with weave, so I suggest you learn that.

http://www.scipy.org/Weave for getting it

http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Weave for examples of use

http://www.scipy.org/PerformancePython for examples of how fast this runs vs other things.

[japherwocky]

""" Java is a bureaucratic language. You have to cross your t's dot your i's, fill out your requests in triplicate at the FactoryFactoryFactory to get the objectOfYourDesire. """

This is such an absolutely fantastic way of succinctly describing why I dislike Java so much. Bureaucratic!

Absolutely fantastic post, get this on a blog somewhere. I seriously wish I could upvote you more.

[vorg]

To use python you need to download it first, from http://www.python.org/download/

It'll work from Hong Kong, and probably most places in the world, but if you cross the Chinese border into Shenzhen, you'll get "The connection has been reset". Same with other places in mainland China I've been.

[rick_2047]

You are not doing C, you are not doing C++, you are not doing Java.

This is the best tip that could be given. In the SICP course in Berkeley CS class, the instructor puts it as

"Don't ask me what the language will do if you do something stupid, the answer will always be either you would get an error or the computer will do something stupid. Don't try to convert java code into LISP, try to think in the language."

[zephyrfalcon]

I've been using Python since around 1996. Back then I had used, or was still using, C, C++, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, BASIC (groan) and assembler.

Python was so much more high-level than all these other languages that it was staggering. It was pretty weird to use it at first. Where are all the declarations? What are these "lists" and "dictionaries"? You mean I can just stick any old thing in an object or even a class? Etc.

Soon it became obvious how much more powerful this new language was, and I enjoyed replacing reams of Pascal/C code with a few lines of Python. I tried to use it at work too, but failed because it was considered "unmaintainable" by the powers that were (this was around 1999-2000). Of course, this just fueled the feeling of having an obscure but superior language rebelling against the big evil statically typed empire. :-)

Anyway, this used to be some of the appeal of Python. I suppose it still applies to some extent, although since then, Python has been passed left and right by languages that are more powerful, more flexible, more functional, more "fun", and whatnot. Nowadays there seems to be a meme going around claiming that e.g. Ruby is fun and flexible, while by contrast Python is boring and conservative. It wasn't always like that. I distinctly recall people discovering Python and exclaiming that "programming is FUN again!".

Then again, all of these things are in the eye of the beholder, mostly. If you don't like Python, no big deal, especially if you have both lower-level (C, C++) and higher-level (Lisp) languages at your disposal. (Personally, I used to think that Ruby was butt-ugly and uninteresting... these days, I have taken more of a liking to the spirit of the Ruby community, which (perhaps ironically) reminds me of Python's in the 1990s.)

[messel]

http://tryruby.org You'll probably still dislike it. But at least you can feel more comfortable comparing python to something.

I prefer Ruby, but appreciate Python and Perl. I come from C/C++ coding for 14 years.

[Estragon]

Yes, you're a bad person. We're assembling a re-education camp for People Like You right now.

[kbob]

The paradigm shift is that in Python the most direct way is best.

Examples.

In Java, accessor methods are considered good style. In Python, directly accessing a member is better. (more concise, makes client code clearer.) If you need to do magic, you can use properties.

In C++ and Java, you use inheritance to denote which classes have a given behavior. In Java, you also use interfaces. In Python, you simply give a class the needed method(s). (I.e., you use duck typing.) That flattens or removes lots of class hierarchies. If you need to do magic, you can use isinstance(), issubclass() or hasattr().

In Python, you use the built-in types a lot. Many problems decompose easily to lists, sets and dictionaries. That reduces code dramatically. Java and C++ STL's containers, in contrast, are so clumsy they make me look for ways to avoid them. If you need to do magic, you can subclass the built-in types or build new types with the same methods as the built-ins.

[experimentor]

Python is a great language. But there is nothing bad about preferring one language/style over another. There are great programmers in all the camps.

Try the other two scripting languages - Ruby and Perl. I would prefer Ruby. See if you like the way things are done there.

If you find that you are more at home with this language than Python, try analyzing what makes you prefer it over Python.

I would suggest you to start with the basics of the Ruby language, and then try building a simple web app with Sinatra. I find the Ruby style much more comfortable than Python.

But if you don't like any of these languages, its still well and good. If you get can shit done with C#, thats all it counts.

[KirinDave]

A lot of us don't like Python. It's a language with a mediocre design, a somewhat frustrating syntax, and a stubborn refusal to commit to such essentials as real closures and lambdas.

It's basically a language written by a group of people who don't trust you (as a Python user) to be knowledgable and educated. Decisions have been made based on the assumption that you are bad at your job.

Now, everyone seems to comfort themselves with the notion of making it “easy for maintenance”; repeating “I am smart, surely, but not everyone can be as smart as I am.” But this is ultimately a dodge that feeds into the problem endemic to our industry: a disdain for everyone else and everyone else's methods if they differ slightly from our indoctrinated best practices.

[lelele]

> It's a language with a mediocre design, a somewhat frustrating syntax, and a stubborn refusal to commit to such essentials as real closures and lambdas.

I agree about closures, but why lambdas would be so much better than named functions (already available)? I think named functions help code readability, which is among Python's top goals.

[cageface]

You owe it to yourself to learn at least one dynamic high level language. The advantage of Python (and Ruby, which I prefer) is that, for the right tasks, it's an extremely productive language. Compared to C++ or Java you have to write far, far less code and you can usually find good libraries that reduce the amount of code you have to write even further. Python doesn't have the elegance or flexibility of Lisp, but it's an extremely practical language for getting anything done that doesn't need C++ performance.

[exit]

curious what you prefer about Ruby. i'm very familiar with python, and have only looked at Ruby long enough to decide (mistakenly?) that it wouldn't do anything for me which python doesn't already.

[Aegean]

I am a day-to-day C programmer. I am surprised to hear Python did not fit well after C for you. In my view, Python is the like the easy scripting version of C. I first learned Tcl/Tk, then Perl, then looked at bash scripting (my god, horrible) and seen that the earlier three has some obscure syntax with some special meanings of $'s and @'s and hyphenated flags everywhere with no resemblance to C.

Then looking into python, I saw the same philosophy as C; A struct or an array? Use a nice dictionary, set, tuple or a list, nicely kept under the [ ] brackets. Throw them in for loops without the iteration integer. Its just all the same things I do in C but easier, with no cryptic idioms. That's why I love it.

I have 2 choices of languages for all my projects: C and Python

[mkramlich]

Agreed. And interesting you said C and Python.

A few years ago I was thinking about what would be the minimum set of languages that would be good to know in order to be able to do almost anything you wanted, and do it well, and to always be employable. I ruled out 1 language alone because of the C phenomenon: there's a whole class of software where today C is the best choice, and a whole different set where C is a bad choice. Therefore, the ideal set was 2+ with C being one. I ended up settling on C, Java and Python. Java for enterprise/BigDumbCompany work, but also because there's a lot of great tooling and innovation happening in the Java space more so than other langs. Python for the role of glue and prototyping and high level no boilerplate bureaucracy but where you could still trust every developer using it. Ruby could probably fill that role decently instead, except be a little better or worse in diff areas.

C, Java, Python

Then I found out that Google had picked these three as well. Nice!

[anon_d]

What do you have against bourne shell scripting? I thinks it's probably the most under-rated language/programming paradigm I know. I really don't understand all the hate. Also, what didn't you like about Tcl? I find it much more in-line with the C world-view than python is; It's C-interface is a lot cleaner than Pythons as well.

My language-choice algorithm is:

sh + unix DSLs -> Tcl/Tcl+C -> SML/Haskell/Scheme -> C -> *

Where '*' is whatever language has a library I need, or a language that I'm required to use.

[doosra]

I started off hating Python as well. I could not stand a language that didn't terminate statements without semicolons! :) And python just seemed a lot like Perl; when using both languages for large projects my code just seemed to degenerate to "hacky."

But I've grown to like the simplicity of Python. One thing I don't like is its threads implementation, however. Because of the GIL, multithreading (GUI + background thread) just doesn't work right. Maybe I'm using it wrong?

[jakevoytko]

The Right Way for a long time was to run multiple processes. If you absolutely needed threads, then the Other Way That Is Less Correct involved launching threads written in C from a C extension

The Python community seems to be warming to the importance of threads. There are several efforts breaking their swords against the GIL nowadays (Unladen Swallow being the most prominent), and Antoine Pitrou wrote a new GIL to help improve contention [1]. With any luck, by the end of the Python Feature Freeze, there will be some significant headway towards efficient handling of threads within Python, but I'm not holding my breath yet ;)

[1] http://www.dabeaz.com/python/NewGIL.pdf

[eru]

> I started off hating Python as well. I could not stand a language that didn't terminate statements without semicolons! :)

I have exactly the opposite heuristic for syntax. The only thing worse than semicolons and curly braces, are `begin' and `end'.

[est]

> I like C++ too

I never met a hardcore C++ guy claim they like C++

> by hardcore I mean the kind of people who wrote Exaile

I think Python weren't meant to write desktop music players. Stuff like Zope are hardcore.

[thedigitalengel]

I never said I was a hardcore C++ guy. :)

I'm more like a hardcore C guy.

I do know a fair bit of C++ though. Perhaps C++ would've been better if compatibility with C was not kept as a fundamental goal. Just a personal opinion.

Qt does an amazing job of taming C++. I used their framework for some GUI design and loved it.

[njharman]

The biggest revelation Python gave me is peoples thought process/problem solving process/whatever you want to call it (I call it brains) work differently. And importantly peoples brains are wired to work really, really well with specific language qualities(dynamic, functional, boilerplateish) as manifested in specific languages. But really poorly with other qualities/languages.

So, no you are not a bad person. If you've given Python a honest attempt (took me a year to do that, I had whitespace hangup that was hard to get past), then you aren't missing anything either. Python just isn't the language for you. Move on, be happy.

[terra_t]

You don't have to like Python. I don't.

Of course, I don't have any pretentions of being a "good person" either.

[neutronicus]

I don't much like it either.

Came from C++, learned Perl, got a job writing Fortran, learned Lisp. When hating on Perl came into vogue on the internet, I said to myself, okay, I will learn Python as a Perl replacement. It is a decent Perl replacement, what with all the libraries and the fact that it is shebang-able.

Now that I've dispensed with background, what I don't like about Python:

1. Assignments don't return values. I hate this. An example. I would like to write:

    if (m = re.match("woo, regular expression")):
        do some stuff with match object

Instead

    m = re.match("woo, regular expression")
    if m:
        do some stuff with match object

This obscures the fact that I only care about this match object if it evaluates to true.

2. List comprehensions kind of suck. [(a, b) for a in as for b in bs] is a cartesian product and not a zip? Really?

3. Loops don't help this either: There's no equivalent of the Lisp (loop for x in xs for y in ys do (stuff x y)). I have to explicitly loop over the index. This pisses me off.

4. I feel that I am generally shoehorned into creating and assigning more objects than I would like.

Honestly it seems kinda crippled in comparison to Lisp, which, by the way, runs faster.

I would go back to Perl if multidimensional arrays were not so godawful. Perhaps I should try Ruby.

[eru]

Perhaps `zip' could help address some of your points?

> 2. List comprehensions kind of suck. [(a, b) for a in as for b in bs] is a cartesian product and not a zip? Really?

Strange. I would say it sucked if it was the other way round. You can use the `zip' function, if you want a zip.

  zip (as, bs)

> 3. Loops don't help this either: There's no equivalent of the Lisp (loop for x in xs for y in ys do (stuff x y)). I have to explicitly loop over the index. This pisses me off.

Try the function `enumerate' and `zip'. E.g.

  for x,y in zip(xs, ys): stuff (x,y)

If you need an explicit index for your stuff:

  for (i, (x,y)) in zip(xs, ys): stuff (x,y)

> 4. I feel that I am generally shoehorned into creating and assigning more objects than I would like.

I agree, only the other way around. Python is much too destructive and relies on in-place updating. E.g. recently we got `sorted' that doesn't sort in-place but return a sorted array --- but the `shuffle' function still works only in-place. Also dicts are destructive. There should be a persistent (i.e. non-ephemeral) data structure for key-value-mappings in the standard library.

[twism]

I was in the same boat as you before, but it is now my "go to" language. It happened when I started using django. Just humor yourself and go through this tutorial:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/

Don't copy and paste the code in the tutorial and when they ask you to type something in the REPL, do it.

That's when it all started for me.

[messel]

I was looking for a smooth way to ramp up my Python (very weak). Just had a little experience with it from the friendfeed api v2 on the app engine.

[l0nwlf]

"My question to the hardcore python lovers is this (and mind you, by hardcore I mean the kind of people who wrote Exaile, not the kind who hack up a Python script every now and then to organize their iPod)"

I'm disqualified to answer - as I come in your so called second type (softcore python lover perhaps), people who uses python to fix things in day to day life.

[endtime]

I like Python because, IMO:

* It's the most concise, expressive language I know * Friendly syntax: I just write what I'm thinking and it pretty much works * Most importantly: It includes a ton of functional programming goodies (of which I make liberal use), but I can still just say x = 1 when I want to. Best of both worlds.

[l4u]

Do you hate scripting languages in general? Maybe you should compare python with other scripting languages.

[Avataristic]

I still write most of my code in C. Could never really warm to C++ and Java was fun in the early days, but the sheer volume of API's, J2EE, et al eventually crushed my spirit.

It took me several goes to become friendly with Python. I find it excellent to try out algorithms. If I don't know how something is going to be best implemented, then writing a bunch of classes in Python and tweaking attributes and methods until the algorithm is as simple as can be helps me get there very fast.

[CyberFonic]

I didn't warm to Python until v2.2. Took an article by Eric Raymond for me to take another look at it and it finally clicked. Great for trying out ideas, etc. But I still write all the heavy duty stuff in C. Its really cool to do the heavy lifting in C and expose it as a shared library and then do the coordination stuff in Python.