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_clydebruckman t1_jclq7zj wrote

Reply to comment by Lenoxx97 in One kidney left but well worth it for this whole build. Neuron w/ Future Funk by thepropbox

They’re making fun of the language, but the world would fucking collapse if python disappeared tomorrow

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sesame_dukes0j t1_jcmftka wrote

It really wouldn't. There's a huge number of python engineers working in academia who think python is as widely used outside of academia as it is within academia.

The reality is it's pretty much exclusively used in academia. In two decades working in this industry I have never even seen a line of python code in my life except for a few blog posts here with sample code and there and even that is extremely rare.

Outside of academia, the best reaction you can hope for is "it must be good, so many other people use it!" but there a lot of people feel the same way about python as a vaccine scientist feels about homeopathy.

I personally think the world would be a better place if python disappeared tomorrow. I've seen articles saying it's 50x slower than other languages. If that's even remotely true - holy shit why would anyone use it for that reason alone? Also the whitespace rules are bullshit. And duck typing is bullshit. It uses garbage collection which is terrible. I could go on.

Many of the flaws in python also exist in other languages, but all of those other languages have other redeeming qualities (e.g. JavaScript is fast and runs everywhere). Python has zero redeeming qualities.

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kai325d t1_jcmjpzs wrote

If pythons disappear tomorrow, so many things would shut down and stop working it would even be funny

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Natbarama t1_jcml6yl wrote

Linux, Cisco switches and routers all use Python scripts IIRC. It would definitely cause some trouble lol

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canibanoglu t1_jco0o74 wrote

So you wrote all that and you don’t even know how to code?

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Ghgore t1_jcnwbtd wrote

Tell that to Discord, Instagram, Ubuntu (and many other distros).

Also speed isn't everything, especially if it comes at the cost of increased crashes due to errors from code complexity.

Plus most libraries are written in C/C++ anyway, so the performance really is not as much of a problem as you make it seem in your comment

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chars101 t1_jcoa9kp wrote

> Also speed isn't everything, especially if it comes at the cost of increased crashes due to errors from code complexity.

Strong typing gives Python an advantage over weakly typed languages like PHP and JS in managing complexity. But I see the advent of type annotations as an attempt to deal with the complexity large systems that people have built, like the ones you mentioned. Much like Typescript tries to do the same with JS code bases.

I've seen my fair share of hard to reason about Python code that breaks at run-time.

I'd rephrase what you said to "Speed isn't everything if you're IO bound." The places where Python has traditionally has been most popular is where it's shoving data around with perhaps some small manipulations. Feeding render pipelines at ILM, web development after people got fed up with the absence of design in PHP 3/4/5 or inheriting unreadable Perl CGI and now datascience and machine learning where it's used to hands on explore the data massage and then do the bulk of work in libraries implemented in Rust or C(++).

If correctness and speed aren't vital, it let's you do a lot with very little. And there's a large community that shares their tooling to help deal with those shortcomings (mypy, pyright, pyre, hypothesis, pandas, polars, PyO3) so you can postpone reimplantation of your Python prototype in a language that is more able to the point where it is unfeasible to do so.

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SlenderSmurf t1_jcna8ff wrote

dont care tbh, it works well for anything that doesn't need to be run at 10 billion calculations a second. Which is where software engineers who get paid to think hard about code live.

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Narrow-Importance65 t1_jcovcsf wrote

JavaScript is not fast and it doesn’t “run anywhere” , you’re thinking of java, which you said sucks because it uses garbage collection. Clearly you haven’t a fuckin clue what you’re talking about.

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