this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 75 points 3 weeks ago (15 children)

The whitespace doesn't bother me. Any IDE worth a damn will manage that for you. As for the type system, yeah, I strongly prefer static typing, but for simpler projects I can see the convenience of it.

My real issue with Python comes with managing a development environment when multiple developers are working on it. Dependency management in Python is a headache, and while in theory, virtual envs should help with synchronizing environments from machine to machine, I still find it endlessly fiddly with a bunch of things that can go wrong that are hard to diagnose.

Python is great for small scripts, proofs-of-concept, and such, but I wouldn't write anything more heavy-duty than that in it.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago (11 children)

You can totally write heavy duty things if you know what you're doing: use type hints, static checkers, tests, etc. It just takes a bit more effort and care.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Personally, my estimate doubles when we're asked to implement something in Python...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

That's a proficiency matter. Python is the language I can get something done the fastest today, but 6 years ago that would be Java or even JS for me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Eh, it's most definitely part of it, but the biggest time sink that I expect when working with Python is fixing the build system every two weeks on different devs' PCs. I do imagine, if you eventually find a solution that works on most PCs that this workload will go down, but we had a substantial Python part in my previous project and over the course of the 1½ years that we worked on it, it really felt like we were making negative progress. Near the end of it, I couldn't use PyCharm anymore, because I couldn't figure out for the life of me, how to make it recognize the dependencies again.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Nah it's also a language matter. People complain about Rusts complexity, meanwhile I complain about everything else in other languages, and am faster than in any other language, not necessarily because writing code is faster, but because I am able to just focus on writing code. I cannot tell that about other languages, because e.g. the packaging system is bad, or configuring an environment, or debugging stuff which a strong type-system would have caught already. Also IDE experience I think is the one thing that keeps me away from dynamic languages. Rust analyzer is so much better than anything else I've tried, and it keeps getting better (e.g. recently it was added to show whether a trait is object safe or not, and why it is not).

Another thing that is often missed when comparing static with dynamic languages is just performance, python heavily relies on stuff written in a system language, as soon as a hot-loop is written in python, things get bad...

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