Python Sucks And I LOVE It | Prime Reacts

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Article: blog.cameron.rs/python-sucks/
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[@riemervdzee]

Python is the second best language for every software problem

[@batatanna]

Oh no you didn't

[@drdesten]

that actually sums it up pretty well

[@SimGunther]

What was the best, C?

[@lazyman2451]

You know what's sucks, when programming an ai that uses too much resource overheat the gpu 😂.

[@louisf2506]

@@SimGuntherwhat they meant was, the best language depends on the project, but Python is the second best choice for every project

[@timmy7201]

As an embedded dev, who usually develops for embedded Linux systems: - I'm all in on C/C++, whenever there is time to build something. - I'm all in on Python3, if management wants it by yesterday! I rather spend my evenings working on my own coding projects, versus working unpaid overtime in C/C++ due to management being incapable of planning ahead!

[@maxinealexander9709]

Same here, also an embedded dev, agree 100% with this!

[@poogle9368]

I'm really enjoying my embedded classes in engineering at uni... what sort of companies hire doing your sort of work? What kind of boards are you mostly working with?

[@timmy7201]

@@poogle9368 I've done a ton of different projects over the years. I started out with embedded systems, for museum and attraction park equipment. After that I went to work at a university for some years, helping post-docs with automating their scientific research. I then went on working for a small engineering firm, which develops medical and aerospace equipment for larger corporations and startups. All above jobs where very interesting, but came with tons of red tape and bureaucracy. So I changed job once more, and now work in a medium sized company that develops access and control systems. Most boards we use are custom made, usually made with Altium or KiCad. They contain a broad range of controllers (imx8, RPI-CM4, ESP32, STM's, etc ...)

[@timmy7201]

​@@poogle9368 Most boards we use, are custom made. But they contain a plethora of chips, eg imx8, RPI-CM4, STM32, ESP32, etc ... For what companies, there are some larger firms and a plethora of smaller startups. The smaller startups are often fast-phased and not for everyone. I however prefer them, as there isn't as much bureaucratic overhead. The larger corporations are extremely well structured, however everything moves at a snails phase which frustrates me massively...

[@timmy7201]

@@poogle9368 Most boards we use, are custom made. But they contain a plethora of chips, eg imx8, RPI-CM4, STM32, ESP32, etc ... The company recommended for you, usually depends on age, interests and personality. The larger firms are extremely well structured, usually respect the 9-5 workhours, with better pay, etc ... Those larger firms are however very bureaucratic, which makes everything progress at a snails phase. I can't stand it, so I avoid these firms. The smaller startups are usually very chaotic, with less respect for the 9-5 workhours, and less pay... The projects are however fast-phased, which means you get a new technical challange about every other month. The only thing I always recommend, is to work for a company that direclty profits of your work. I mean with this, make sure the product you develop is meant to be sold! Avoid companies that hire you for internal service or development work, they usually deem your function as an unavoidlable overhead.

[@macaroni_italic]

I used to be vehemently against Python for superficial reasons until I actually learned it. Sure, it's overly opinionated about shit that doesn't matter (indentation) and it has a few truly gross quirks (loop variables are available out the loop itself, rather than being scoped to it). But it's just a really fantastic scripting language. If you're trying to write something quick and dirty to solve an immediate problem, it's really hard to go wrong with Python. It reads and writes like a perfect, formalized version of pseudocode. It's got great built-in libraries, and its popularity means that it has shit-tons of amazing third-party libraries covering pretty much any use case you can imagine. And honestly, gripes about performance are completely overblown. Nobody is trying to write bare-metal systems code in Python, and if they are, they've simply chosen the wrong tool. That doesn't make Python a bad language.

[@billy818]

But also all the stuff that needs to be quick has something like a C backend it interops with anyway. take: Pandas Tensorflow Pytorch Numpy etc they are all interoping with something faster behind the scenes to do thing like malloc contiguous memory ect python is just the application logic and they are fast enough 99.9% of the time. Pure python is slow, sure, but if you are using python is probs because of a libary it has.

[@thekwoka4707]

Past that though, it is pretty awful. And apps made with it get REALLY stupid to work with. JavaScript does better performance, easy scripting, and less foot guns. A few less anyway.

[@lydianlights]

I hate python's variable declaration and scoping. It's way too easy to write unreadable spaghetti.

[@danielvalle8875]

> It reads and writes like a perfect, formalized version of pseudocode Pretty good description of Python

[@danielvalle8875]

@@lydianlights And get side effects

[@CottidaeSEA]

The thing I like about Python is that it's really good for getting basic things out of the way quickly. As long as you have a library that does the thing you need to do, you'll probably have good performance, because that'll be written in a more performant language.

[@JohnSmith-ox3gy]

It's as simple as running hack.exe and saying "I'm in."

[@melonenlord2723]

You hope that it's written effective and not uses another 20 packages just to do simple stuff that can be written in a few lines of fast code xD

[@CottidaeSEA]

​@@melonenlord2723 Pretty much, yes. That's one of the reasons why I check the dependencies of anything that I am planning to use long-term. Edit: Originally wrote it differently, but the phrasing was a very ugly double negative.

[@HitBoxMaster]

Correct. Let the C/C++ autists struggle. I wanna have fun programming 😂

[@kayakMike1000]

Mostly... Those libraries suck, mostly. You would be surprised what can be done by the standard library.

[@khhnator]

the problem is that every small program eventually will become a massive enterprise mess

[@virtuosisimo]

Yes, I usually like starting my messes in bash

[@ZoraAlven]

@@Derian_De_Greyyeah, and at the end there is no difference AT ALL in time spent, in comparison with just all the way mastering C from the start, for example.

[@lmnts556]

Then go use C, its been the same forever and is the grandfather of all.

[@jarvinIV]

@@Derian_De_Grey idk i guess it exists as spotify and instagram are running django

[@austenmoore7326]

No every enterprise program started small but most small problems stay that way. You just never have to think about them again if their pure one offs lol

[@frustratedalien666]

I relate with this guy. I had a few years of experience writing assembly, C, and C++ code when I first came across Google's Python training videos. I could code but I didn't like coding. 2 days with Python totally changed that. I remember writing a script in 30 minutes that scraped transit timetables from a website and helped me finish a data analysis project that would have typically taken me a long time to write. I've loved Python ever since and though I spent years writing Java, I finally managed to switch to Python professionally and love it. New releases of Java, especially with Streams have made Java a lot easier to like, but I still prefer to use Python for nearly all of my personal projects. The new proposal to remove the GIL from Python should make it run a lot faster soon

[@burarum1]

Yes there will be a official no-GIL version of python but just like all the other attempts in history it will make single threaded performance worse.

[@jarvinIV]

@@burarum1 we could have the two and like use one rather than the other as soon as we multi thread

[@-ciii-]

relatable

[@Taverius]

I can believe the LISP thing, once you've done enough CL/Scheme/Clojure the parenthesis madness disappears like the code of the matrix and you just see the tree of code, it's like learning Vim motions. Takes a *while* to get there tho ngl 🤣

[@macaroni_italic]

Yeah, Lisp is actually a very productive language. With a proper programming environment, the parentheses are a non-issue. You can write extremely elegant solutions to problems.

[@MoolsDogTwoOfficial]

@@macaroni_italic (are you(sure(about that)))

[@NoidoDev]

Lisp is so good that it is likely the reason for it's "failure". Guys can write programs on their own, don't care about documentation and making other people understand their code. Also, they don't want to teach anyone, since it's their secret sauce, or because they could write more programs in the time they waste on teaching people about how it works writing documentation.

[@The1RandomFool]

The main reason I learned Python was because of my hobby in higher mathematics. The open source software SageMath is wonderful and is built on slightly modified Python.

[@thomasvandervliet9387]

If you hobby is mathematics try Lisp or Clojure

[@ZombieLincoln666]

I remember trying Sage like 15 years ago bc I didn’t want to buy Mathematica or matlab. I’m guessing it’s way more useable now

[@cusematt23]

I am just starting my coding journey. Your videos have this incredible way at jabbing at the little idiosyncratic nuisances that even a beginner like myself encounters. Really entertaining channel man I have laughed out loud several times. Quite informative too honestly, since sometimes making fun of a certain issue makes it more relatable to our own experiences, which makes it easier for us to understand why that certain issue exists in the first place. Holy run on sentence.

[@AdamHoelscher]

I very much enjoy your videos on the whole. Your mix of bawdy humor and blunt CS commentary has me constantly swinging between learning something fantastically valuable and laughing away the annoyances of my career. This one especially spoke to me. I work as a Data Scientist. I will out-Excel 99% of the world, I learned VBA (shudder) as my first language, I love R for my EDA and I will script any random thing that I expect to run twice (once when I think I know what's going on, again when I realize I f'ed up and it's more complex than I thought) in Python. My employer is constantly pushing for more speed and that has me deep in Go and and exploring Rust. These are all fantastic tools, *for purpose*. I'll never write a Go program to graph correlation from a sample data set, and I'll never write R to run a publicly exposed web server. People who shit on a certain tool don't understand the power of context and the fact that you, the Crustious Crustacean KZbinr I know of, will flat out say "Python can be a quick W; when you just need to get something done, get it done" makes me smile. Sometimes, it's just the right tool.

[@jffrysith4365]

this points out the point I always make. Python can easily make a reasonably good calculator. If you want to know 50 * 50 you just type 50 * 50. In Java you would need to do: public class program { public static void main(string[] args) { System.out.printf("%d", 50 * 50); } } which is significantly longer and easier to mess up. This obv has it's values, but sometimes the performance doesn't matter and you may as well just use python.

[@leetaeryeo5269]

This article really captured my thoughts on Python well. It's not the most performant language out there in terms of raw execution speed (you can improve it with Cython or PyPi, but still, it's never gonna be C or Go or Rust), but the speed and ease at which you're able to just solve a problem with a usually reasonable level of performance just feels good. I've started using it a lot for smaller automation tasks and alerts for technologies that don't have good tools for alerting. And Flask legit is just my favorite micro web framework (despite all the problems with microservice architectures). The productivity is just so nice, so long as you keep in mind that you need to use the right tool for the right problem (a Netflix-scale web API probably needs something more performant).

[@whu.9163]

Python devs have FastAPI. Why would you use Flask instead of it? I'm not a pythonista myself to prove next statement but this microframework looks like a game changer for python in web)

[@conan_der_barbar]

@@whu.9163 what are the major differences?

[@FrederikSchumacher]

Using Flask is like saying a roof ripped away by a tornado a minor inconvenience. It's not completely wrong, but massively understates the complexity of the situation, and depends on the focus of the observer. FastAPI very easily allows mixing async and sync handlers. Integration with Pydantic is non-frictional. Writing something small using decorated endpoint handlers is as easy as creating more class-based endpoint handlers (unlike Flask). The dependency injection works and is welcome for anything slightly more complex than the trivial tutorial examples in Flask. There are some annoyances, mainly the default error handling mechanism is absolute ass, and just about requires complete replacement for even the most trivial customization, just like adding CORS support (either the default is okay for you, or you have to configure _everything_). Also the main documentation is largely okay, however severely lacks a reference section. Although it must be mentioned, a great deal of FastAPI features are actually just Starlette features, the framework FastAPI is based on. And often there's better information in the Starlette docs than there is in the FastAPI docs, something where the FastAPI developers could make more effort to at least _link to_.

[@rascar8903]

So you're saying you would use FastAPI Any day over Flask ?@@FrederikSchumacher

[@auroraRealms]

@@conan_der_barbar FastAPI is asyncronis, by just adding the "async" keyword if front of functions. FastAPI also provides a complete "docs" page that automaticly writes all the API documentation. Also, FastAPI is the new rookie kid on the block. So the only real reasons to use Flask are, that it is grandfathered in, or if you want to make a Rapid Development Website for a limited number of users inside a Subnet.

[@billy818]

On the point about type script being "enterprise" and allowing you to build these huges messes python has inbuilt type hints with generics and union types now

[@calliioa]

as someone who uses mypy and type annotations like it's the bible, not really type annotations is the greatest python feature in recent memory, intellisense, code docs and reading/writing code is so much more ergonomic with it however, it's just that - annotations you still need the external mypy tool to type check your code and python will still be python, lazily typed and runtime type error prone, it really just helps to double check your code rather than to be a better language plus python already is kinda enterprise already tbh

[@fueledbycoffee583]

@@calliioa we run a python backend for our platform with flask and we use python type annotations like if it was typescript. I love it and makes everything more ergonomic to work with

[@smallfox8623]

Python's built in type hints are epically shit. They are orders of magnitude worse than TypeScript types.

[@cheaterman49]

@@smallfox8623 Hard disagree, particularly considering recent progress, and it's only getting better.

[@KayOScode]

Making it more of a mess. Why not

[@Xemptuous]

Python is what I use at work, and it's so easy to do simple things like getting data from APIs and doing ETLs and other data manipulation. It's like bash in that it's super easy to automate and finish something quickly that works "fast enough" for most things that most people need.

[@computerfan1079]

Python and data processing are a match made in heaven

[@thorbergson]

And with readability that bash scripts can only dream of. Generally, I find that you have to be actively malign to conceal your intent in Python. It can be ugly, inefficient, babbling, but rarely do I stare at a Python function thinking "what the f* is this even doing?" which happens a lot in some other languages

[@darkwoodmovies]

I'd like to know how many hours of oncall and lost engineer productivity could be traced back directly to a lack of typing and the shitty patterns in Python. I see it all the time in frontend work, the JS code always has random bugs that we have to fix, but the correctly-typed TS code almost never has issues unless something in the backend changed.

[@vikramkrishnan6414]

Lisp actually takes very little time to develop because code = data. So you design your data structs and algos follow naturally. I wrote some Clojure code and it was a pleasure to write in

[@laughingvampire7555]

and if you use common lisp, your dynamic code will run faster than any python code, and even faster than clojure. all you have to do is use SBCL and CLOS, for the javascript part you use parenscript a compiler of a subset of cl to js

[@balenol1209]

I still have no idea how lisp programmer can be confident when using a function in lisp without knowing the types of the input.

[@vikramkrishnan6414]

@@balenol1209 LISP is the OG REPL-icious language. Just turn on the REPL and call the function

[@balenol1209]

@@vikramkrishnan6414 that's not a good argument. Using REPL is cool to test a function, but it wouldn't catch the requirement of an input's type holistically.

[@BosonCollider]

@@balenol1209 Typed scheme exists, you can implement a type checker using macros. But mostly it is indeed the OG dynamically typed language. Some dialects have first class contracts as the idiomatic way to enforce constraints, including type constraints

[@haxwithaxe]

In the past 8 years I don't think I've come across situations where python wasn't performant enough with room to spare even when I was doing things that needed to be as fast as possible (DNS server oddly enough). More than 8 years ago I did a bunch of image processing that python couldn't do in a timely manner. That was doing a visual diff between documents thousands of pages long.

[@kubre]

Just like [x for x in list] you can use parenthesis instead of square brackets like (x for x in list) to use generator comprehension instead of list comprehension, which is lazily generated

[@mattmess1221]

If you pass it as the only argument to a function, you don't even need the parenthesis. foo(x for x in lst)

[@kubre]

@@mattmess1221 this is also true but usually looks kinda ugly for more than 1 arguments

[@gracjanchudziak4755]

You can do this for other types: tuple(x for x in some_list) [{x:y} for x, y in some_list]

[@maleldil1]

@@kubre for more than one argument, then parentheses are mandatory.

[@raffimolero64]

"Python is Slow" > Discord bot tbh the difference in speed between python and rust, is not significant for applications that do a lot of async calls like just waiting for user input and stuff. unless of course your bot is used in a lot of servers or if it does heavy computation or something. the author probably knows this anyway :P

[@k98killer]

I have been using Python to make reference implementations of stuff I found in math and computer science papers for a while now. Great language for doing that. For example, I recently created a genetic algorithm library; I started in Python, then reimplemented in Go; Go was more performant by a wide margin even before I refactored to use memory pools (which resulted in a 99.94% reduction in benchmark times for simple use cases).

[@MrTyty527]

That's a very nice roadmap - you must have learned tons from it!

[@k98killer]

@@MrTyty527 I have, yes. Very fun way to get back into the groove of things after being sick and useless for 3 weeks. Prior to the illness, I was implementing the Practical Isometric Embedding protocol, but I've put it on the back burner for now. A couple months ago, I implemented a scripting language based on Bitcoin script for use as embedded ACL in distributed systems; last year, I made a bunch of advanced cryptography proofs-of-concept (e.g. taproot and ed25519 signature adapters); the year before that, I implemented MuSig. Python is my go-to language for figuring stuff out because all the building blocks for anything I want to do are available.

[@mallukittens177]

​@@k98killerwow how long you been programming? What was your first language? What all projects you did at the beginning?

[@k98killer]

@@mallukittens177 I started as a kid writing batch/command scripts in Windows XP; within a few years, I had learned c/old c++ on Linux, a Windows scripting language based on Basic called AutoIt, and bash scripting. In highschool, I learned JavaScript, ActionScript+Flash, HTML+CSS, and PHP. From the start, my interests were largely in networked/telecom programs. One early project was using the built-in CLI network tools on Windows to make a simple chat program. One of my first C programs was a UDP chat program on Linux. I basically try to make chat apps in every language I learn using whichever methods/strategies i think are worth exploring, e.g. I explored multicast UDP a few months ago.

[@hawkingradiation3774]

how does he get this kind of energy, feels like he is always on crack to get this energy in him, and his video edits are hilarious

[@miguelarribas9990]

Too much time in front of a screen doing software engineering causes changes in the brain that alter how reality is perceived, akin to consumption of psychodelic drugs or achieving nirvana by self starvation. I am working hard to reach that state of consciousness that he has achieved.

[@hawkingradiation3774]

@@miguelarribas9990 yeah me too

[@GAT0SY]

the ultra [coding] instinct.

[@gracjanchudziak4755]

Fun fact: they can easly make Python much much faster, but they don't want lost all compatibility with tools, librares and frameworks.

[@oderchannel426]

I mean they were fine with losing compatibility when making python 3 lol

[@gracjanchudziak4755]

@@oderchannel426 no, they were shocked by the number of tools written in Python. Check what Guido van Rossum thinking about this.

[@Acorn_Anomaly]

​@@oderchannel426yeah, and look how much of a problem that was. There's shit out there that still won't get off 2.7.

[@chndrl5649]

As a data scientist, I can tell you that’s why I love Polars as a baby of mama RUST and Python. It so fast to process and analyze data, both development ease/time and performance

[@Fiercesoulking]

You can use the compile option unter Linux with Pytorch but it won't be as fast as C++ at least not until everything is compiled., I'm just a guy playing around but I just recreated my Python NN with all its function in Pytroch C++ Frontend, It went from ca 40-60 minutes down to 4 minutes and I'm still in Debug . When you run this in an professional environment this makes huge difference in money.

[@allah9896]

In what aspects is polars faster? It’s just parallelizing the processes automatically under the hood from what i’ve seen. Is there something else that makes it more efficient? I tested polars code and pandas split up in a multiprocessing pool and the time was the same. just curious as i’m a data science intern atm.

[@chndrl5649]

@@Fiercesoulking Yeah the big deep learning frameworks are all catching up with performance. It does make huge differences~

[@chndrl5649]

@@allah9896 I mean query optimization is pretty great, and also the syntax just make the coding part so much more efficient and easy to follow

[@katrinabryce]

@@allah9896 How big is your dataset? If it is 10,000 items, you probably won't notice any difference between them. But if it is 60,000,000, like a dataset I'm working on at the moment, Polars is very fast whereas Pandas just falls over.

[@xesf]

I end-up in python for obvious ml reasons and I agree with the article. It is a joy to script in python exactly because you can get stuffs up and running pretty fast. For me is like executing pseudo-code!!!

[@Alfred-Neuman]

When I was young we had something called Basic, it was similar to python in many ways. For example it was easier to learn, simpler to write and ran slower than C or ASM. And just like today, the "real" programmers that were seeing you using this automatically had to look at you with disgust... lol Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil!

[@davejohncole]

LOL. Just stumbled on this. I wrote a C extension for Python that eventually became the CSV module in Python. I did it because i was working on a fixed price project dealing with 100's of megabytes of CSV files exported from SQL Server via Excel (don't ask... Finance people are strange). Each iteration of my code during development took 45 minutes using a pure Python parser I wrote to strictly implement Excel semantics. It was literally costing me money that Python was so slow. I figured I could develop the parser in C and finish the project in less time than just continuing in pure Python. Turned out I was right. I submitted the pretty raw code to the Python project and over a couple of months, with the help of two other people, made it a lot nicer to use.

[@Margen67]

Piplup needs HUGS

[@hotfishdev]

The best program is the one that does its job. A program cannot do its job unless it is written. If Python lets you actually write the program where another language would have been a blocker, it was the best language for the job. If you need to consider changing the implementation language later, you’ve won.

[@paulholsters7932]

I am building my no code tool MVP in TypeScript. Later I’ll build the complete thing in Go. And at the end probably in Rust. Seems like a natural evolution. And what I’ve build so far works great!

[@MaryTheTankGirl]

Apparently C is easier to work with then Java, and also runs faster, so my takeaway is I'll be using C.

[@cheaterman49]

It takes forever to get anything done, but the simplicity makes the footguns more obvious (also the low level makes the footguns more like foot dynamite). C++ is particularly guilty of making the footguns non-obvious, and sometimes UB takes millions of iterations to surface, good luck finding them in your test suite :-/

[@MaryTheTankGirl]

@@cheaterman49 I think this is true, but C is not C++. I feel C is very clean. There are not a lot of concepts you have to hold in your head. If you know how the memory works it’s very clear. C++ just adds a lot of abstractions that make things less obvious.

[@isodoubIet]

Yeah that was also where I stopped taking that graph seriously

[@isodoubIet]

@@MaryTheTankGirl " C++ just adds a lot of abstractions that make things less obvious." Yeah but those abstractions when designed well are incredibly helpful. There's no universe in which mallocing and freeing everything explicitly is better than using vector or unique_ptr. There simply isn't.

[@MaryTheTankGirl]

@@isodoubIet Absolutely 💯. I didn’t mean to imply that these abstractions are bad. I just think it’s more complex, because there are more features.

[@douglascerqueira9537]

in the icpc (international collegiate programming contest), the python is in fact more fast to write, if you has the best solution in python and other language, python will be more easy to easy to write, all those built in methods helps a lot

[@myxail0]

C++ is king for competetive programming

[@miguelacuna7148]

Love your content, you give me some Dr. Disrespect vibes but for engineers.

[@Ceelbc]

You can add type hints in python. Your IDE will give you warnings when you don't follow those.

[@0xCAFEF00D]

1:50 CPython (what you get if you apt-get python3) does not have a JIT. pypy is a jitted interpreter of python. It's alright. Don't recall if they support the entire language or what was going on but I've used it and it works alright. It's no V8 though.

[@scorpo999]

it is even harder to distribute python than TS. A lot of python modules rely on OS level packages, you can install something with pip and it will still not work.

[@edwardcullen1739]

This is as true as it is false. There's many reasons for this, least of which is that libraries are badly written or only supported on one platform.

[@scorpo999]

@@edwardcullen1739 from my personal bias exp js/ts tend to be more plat agnostic as authors tend to not step outside of node/ js/wasm sandbox. with wasix i think this will skew it even more in the future as some of the c libs could be recompiled.

[@eUnkn0wn]

That's why you use venvs and setuptools or Poetry.

[@isodoubIet]

@@eUnkn0wn The fact that you need something like venvs to make sense of the dependency hell is as much an indictment of python as anything.

[@stxnw]

@@isodoubIetYou use node_modules..

[@reaperinsaltbrine5211]

REXX (Rstructured EXtended eXecutor) is a very nice language :) It was designed for systems administration. It was also designed to be run interpreted OR compiled. While it's PL/I isnpired syntax may put off someone, it is really an excellent scripting/sysadmin language. BTW I also can run with Perl. If I had to choose between Lua, Python or Perl I'll go Perl any time. And as opposed to NPM, CPAN actually works :D

[@imblackmagic1209]

getting started on a project or prototyping stuff is way way faster on python, that said, I've worked on a project that had the data gathering and some processing in C++ as it had to be ultra fast, and the bulk of matrix data processing in python... python would've struggled hard on the C++ part, and I would've struggled writing the python part in C++

[@carlwilde635]

Pythonista - An anagram of “A Hypnotist”

[@Blaisem]

dios mio you are right

[@cparks1000000]

Python has typehints and mypy. It has generics and can emulate higher-kinded-types using mypy plugins. You can make a completely statically typed program.

[@ma34529]

5:17 - 5:36 is by far the best content PrimeDaddy has ever put out there. Ive been dying for 5 minutes and its not my ring tone.

[@xDELTAGIx]

I did Rexx programming, im pretty sure it would take longer as there is little to no useful info because it was designed for mainframe. Good luck with stack overflow, my first job was using rexx all the time and I couldnt do anything with it, but I could with C++

[@Sean-jg9sd]

I would love LOVE to watch you develop something in TCL, especially if you’ve never heard of it until now

[@nickr753]

Deno is great for ts because you can use it to compile your utility into a distributable binary-the person on the other end doesn’t have to know what ts or Deno is

[@ConnectionRefused]

I love types now, but I used to do a lot of Ruby on Rails, and sometimes miss it...I could bang out a fully functional app (front end, back end, db, authentication, multiple data models, robust data validation and error handling) in a day or two. I spent most of yesterday debugging generic function signatures in TS 😶

[@rozennrd4802]

Same with django. Django is not easy to deploy tho

[@ConnectionRefused]

@@rozennrd4802 Yeah I had a good experience with Django too, the built-in admin console was a great idea IMO. I've been meaning to try fastAPI, looks like maybe a happy medium between type safety + efficiency

[@Monkeydew1o2]

Python has one advantage that is GREATLY overlooked. By being arguably the fastest language to develop in and the slowest language to run. It FORCES you to become extremely crafty with your code optimizations and due to ease of use. lets you trial and error to that point quickly. I used python to make a brokerage simulator. first run was so slow It couldn't be used. The current one is so fast I had to add implicit delays to not break rate limits. Skilled engineers trump the inherent weakness of a language by being better.

[@OmarHashimOAD]

good point

[@4idenn]

As a Pythonista myself, I love this article

[@Omnifarious0]

CPython doesn't have a JIT. There is an implementation of Python (PyPy) that does. But PyPy has compatibility hurdles with Python modules written in C.

[@jasonorozco1587]

"I'm a guy who only basically likes type really I'm a type guy Only write type It's all i do"

[@ANONAAAAAAAAA]

What I can't understand is the reason why these "performance conscious" developers start worrying about performance even before measuring the performance of the program and identify the bottlenecks. For many cases, especially when developing backend systems, bottlenecks tend to live in IO or data storage layer so using "fast" language like Rust, C++ doesn't help much to improve the performances of the system anyway.

[@eveleynce]

right, like these people are making a discord bot, the bottleneck is discord's API, which takes about a second per request regardless of any other factors, so your best bet is to send off as many requests as possible at the start of your command and then do all your calculations while discord is slowly doing its thing, and that's about as performant as it can get no matter your language of choice

[@avarise5607]

Premature optimization is a problem, but there is validity to speeding up even when bottlenecked by IO. And it is simply to reduce resource usage. Not saying this is major part or important part in early development, but it should not be ignored entirely

[@marcs9451]

having IO or network bottlenecks is not a valid excuse in most cases. you shouldn't prematurely optimize but "pessimizing" your code isn't good either.

[@ea_naseer]

​@@marcs9451... in most cases this falls off that cliff.

[@cheaterman49]

@@marcs9451 Profile then optimize. If your code happens to be a bottleneck, first find where/why, then fix it. Prematurely writing everything in the fastest possible way is a recipe for disaster - and that applies to Rust too: as Prime already said, your first implementation of pretty much anything in Rust should be very ugly, very slow, making copies everywhere etc - and if that's fast enough to ship, then no need to waste expensive engineer hours optimizing it further. Python is just taking this approach to an extreme where machine time is considered largely irrelevant in cost compared to human time, and that seems to be true for most companies with most (medium sized) user-bases. It only makes sense to consider machine time when your hosting is within an order of magnitude of an engineer's salary ; if you're paying a $5 VPS each time you do a new client project because there's gonna be less than 1k users, meanwhile the engineer responsible for optimizing said backend costs $5000/mo to the company, the Python approach is the obvious correct one.

[@dymytryovchev1500]

APL matrix operations are cool. Anything else is a pain) Developed a back-end of a system in an APL.

[@landscapesandmotion]

If he likes Elixir but wants types he should pay attention to Gleam Lang. It’s a typed BEAM language. Looks pretty neat. And the BEAM VM/OS makes building resilient systems easy.

[@laughingvampire7555]

common lisp is faster than python in both runtime execution and productivity. This is why Rich Hickey who was a C++ expert with 15 years of experience chose Lisp over C++ Hickey was making a software for a customer he first made it in common lisp, took him 6 months then the customer was impressed of how fast that was but had an additional requirement it had to be in C++ and Hickey with having the problem figured out, rewriting it in C++ took him 18 months.

[@Maric18]

i have some bigger python projects it definitely is something you ideally write one moduel that does a thing in and then use that from other modules strongly coupling hundreds of things together is definitely yikes in python

[@RogerValor]

I find python actually nice for large projects, if the project is mainly dealing with database work or handling lots of exotic ever changing business requests between multiple apis. So big horizontal projects. I saw once a java api read our output back into their system, where they were the source of truth, simply because they found our data more reliable than their own, and because implementing the validation in their project took way longer. i think it is because of dictionaries and lists, having untyped dict class as first class citizen also makes it really easy to deal with json, while actually all the typing tools like TypedDict, dataclass, namedtuple and whatnot help you to formalize the actual data structures in various ways. in companies, where you are helplessly bound to other apis written by multiple teams, the python team is like a beacon of hope, while also usually being super humble since they know python is much easier and slower, and are used to being belittled.

[@Ersteller]

I feel one important aspect is missing in the video and the discussion. It is cross-platform. It takes some effort to do that with C/C++. Maybe not relevant for a Discord bot. If a Python program seems slow, most of the time it is because of the way the developer thought it had to be done. For instance, multiple levels of loops inside each other and looping over strings and searching for a keyword or adding it individually to another string which you would maybe do in C. It takes some time to get an intuition for what things are slow in Python but then you can avoid them and use appropriate built-in types like linked lists and hashmaps which are way better to work with in Python than buffers pointers and structs or classes.

[@CallousCoder]

Python is always a hassle in production! New version of the interpreter that gets install by your OS and your code may break. Update of modules and your code may break. The mortal sin started with breaking compatibility with 2.7 (idiots). Libraries that the module use (especially anything OpenSSL) and your code breaks. *SSL libraries never a dull time (in any language) You want a statically compiled binary on production that you know your OS or Docker can change and your code will still work. Python also npm (had that last week at the bank) suddenly doesn’t work because a new version of ADF ARM deployment required a new version of NodeJS. Ugghhhh I hate that! Exact same build function call and yet “version mismatch” wtf?! If the interface doesn’t change your code shouldn’t break! Especially for doing the exact same thing! So for just a tool that doesn’t need to run production grade software use what you want. For production grade software I stand with compiled languages with string typing only! And the binary needs to be statically compiled so is independent from system updates. But sane people who write Python don’t operate in a mission critical environment (I hope).

[@andrewtran9870]

Woahhh, that's a mad enlightening take on typescript

[@rando521]

i just tried that and got more stackoverflow stuff than my actual questions . man helped me get stuff done

[@vex355u_fan]

The elephant in the room for Python: package management. It's terrible and there are no good options. Conda takes forever to build environments. Pip may not give a valid environment at all.

[@the_mastermage]

this right here is why i shift my attention as a scientist to Julia (I know it is not a general purpose as python especially cause static compilation is not yet a thing) and Rust because their Package managers are superior. Julia built from the begining with both a package manager and environment manager. And the greatness that is cargo in Rust.

[@VH-in9jj]

Mamba

[@__reth__x]

Editing and performance are on point

[@codeworld4172]

Now selling asmr tracks of prime whispering “ruuussstttt”

[@velezmusic4350]

I am inspired to get better at coding so I can understand all the developer insiders you tell. Love your content bro bro

[@saeedjf]

I'm learning F# and I think there is no need for me to learn python. It is succinct, static typed with the feeling of being dynamic and it is fast. This is my third language after PHP and Js and I love it much more.

[@landonyarrington7979]

1. Certain implementations of Python have JIT. The mostly-used implementation, CPython, does not. PyPy does. There is also Cython for ahead-of-time compilation 2. Python has optional typing. Because my company doesn't use TS, I get more static type safety in Python than I do in JavaScript 😂I maintain a handful or python projects, and all of them are >95% statically-typed. 3. Polars, a Rust dataframe library with Python bindings, is really cool -- blazing fast (rust) and succinct (python)

[@doronvaida]

actually python type annotations, static type checkers and a data modeling and validation library like pydantic make developing large scale projects a pleasure.

[@Frankablu]

That is a terrible way to develop large python projects as it slows down your development speed. You should be using microservice based architecture instead.

[@FlanPoirot]

mypy is terrible, its type checker is actually kind of faulty, I've caught it allowing me to do stuff that should obviously violate the type system. pydantic requires a rust runtime to know the types, so you have a small performance hit on top of the already slow CPython interpreter/virtual machine.

[@borjonx]

I like how he said “able to ship it fast, including time for testing” LOL. Because what, you usually don’t have time to test???

[@Speykious]

I think the complete opposite. I've made a Discord bot before. In fact, I wrote the same Discord bot 4 times: the first and second time in JS, the third time in CoffeeScript, the fourth time in TS. I can tell you, the third rewrite was by far the worst to work with. There were random bugs occurring due to the lack of static typing, and they took hours upon hours of debugging to find. All these bugs vanished when I rewrote it in Typescript. And it didnt even take more time to make it than when I wrote the coffeescript version. It was just better from the get go. Thats why I cannot see myself loving the experience of making an entire product in a dynamically typed programming language. I'll just write code slower because I'm constantly thinking of types I have to now hold in my head instead. For me, Rust being fast is a bonus. The *real* benefit is its extremely helpful type system.

[@nandoflorestan]

Python is a strongly typed language. You can treat it as a statically typed language and have a type checker (called mypy) running while you program. The effect is like Typescript. @Speykious

[@DmitrijKudriavcev]

Python is by far my favourite language. Writting code on it just feels pleasing. I'm not using it everywhere just becsuse it poor performance and outdated environment. If someone would create a go variant with python syntax instead of this bulky mess, it would instantly become my number uno language

[@bz3963]

When I had to start using typescript in my new position I hated it, there was so much work you had to do just to get it up and running. Coming from Python and C++, where you can just install the interpreter or compiler, a quick IDE and boom you can start programming and playing around, this just ruined it for me.

[@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi]

in Python loops do not create a scope inside, you declare a variable inside a loop it will be visible outside Perl rules, all the problems are already solved and there was a module for them before you found out the problem existed ;-)

[@mmmhorsesteaks]

Pypy is a jit for python written in python (kind of) and is quite fast.

[@FrederikSchumacher]

I think it's very clear: people love shitting on forced indentation because they're the guilty ones, the ones with abysmal indentation practices. And Python makes that a syntax error... **giggles**

[@nithinrajendran3091]

Exactly, I consider it a good feature

[@copperspartan1643]

I just let the editor take care of that and don’t think about it too much in any language. The only exception is in YAML, which sometimes confuses me and the editor.

[@MungeParty]

*giggles* should be a syntax error, that was painful to read.

[@byronservies4043]

Love TCL/Tk. Tk was also the basis of graphical output for tons of scripting languages for ages.

[@Realrebitsch]

I am a python developer. It was the first language i have learnt and i just kept getting jobs. It is pretty good for externally bottlenecked, server gluecode projects, but you can shot yourself in the foot with it quite easily. while "anyone can write python", and be super productive, you still want to hire developers who know what they are doing, and give them enough time write it properly, if your project is larger than a few thousand lines. a comprehensive automated test suite is essential. that way it IS faster. but there is a prisoners dilemma type problem with python: you can churn out code that seems to work way faster than it would take to write it in a maintainable way. But since the pitch to the suits was that it would get done fast, it is against your personal interest to do a proper job, because "delivering results" is advantageous to your career. The fact that it will end up taking much longer this way will not lead back to you, because it will just cause the other devs work slower, and incrementally grind the whole project across the board.

[@MrAbrazildo]

1:12, nowadays there are tools, like converting it to C, that make it 15x slower. 4:00, no possible way for C++ to stay below C, in productivity.

[@laughingvampire7555]

Brendan Eich said in his interview with Lex Friedman that JavaScript was supposed to be the bash script for the Java's C on Netscape, because Netscape saw that as the way to make the web the next platform and render OS's meaningless, that is why the object model of the DOM is so complex because it was meant for Java Dabba Dupe, but Sun Microsystems never delivered because Sun wanted Java to become that platform, "code once, run everywhere" That is why Eich had only 10 days to make that pos.

[@geuros]

There's the concept of absolute speed and relative speed. And by relative I mean not relative to other languages but to fast enough performance. You can have projects where Python is comfortably fast enough and anything faster than that makes sense only if you can develop it faster. You might have projects where Python is not fast enough.

[@ShadoFXPerino]

APL is mostly parallel in design goals to Python though, it's a very high-level language. It even has the added benefit of being faster to type if you have the special keyboard, so once you're truly good at APL you will dev faster than Python.

[@VojtaJavora]

I have now idea how trains work but sign me up, still better than python.

[@fantasdeck]

Python has type hints and mypyc enforces them to compile Python to C with them, alone. The problem is that Python devs routinely don't type-hint their code.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

i do love type hinting of python

[@Frankablu]

Well you shouldn't type-hint Python code, at least not in a way that mypyc could valid it. Static typing comes with the drawback of significantly longer development times (usually 3x). Type hints in Python should be reserved for annonating your external API calls in Flask, etc. Not running a type checker.

[@WralthChardiceVideo]

Oh, I wholeheartedly agree that perl is winning in terms of how long it takes to solve a problem. It's just that the solution becomes a problem in of itself after an approximate 3 days of not having looked at the code, so while perl is fast at solving problems, it is by no means not capable of exacerbating the throughput of problems you need to solve just by its own nature.

[@kassios]

You missed a great opportunity to finish with "The name is the pythogen"

[@chickenduckhappy]

Python all by itself is a nice and easy language to play with that lacks both the LISPy flexibility and the accidental chaos of JS. Python in professional practice, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast: it is an extremely productive runtime and build environment for blazingly fast modules written in C that would be horrible to use and combine inside C itself. It brings high-leven sanity to projects built around lots of C code. It thus delivers what C++ has once promised but never achieved.

[@FrederikSchumacher]

I never got the hype around TypeScript, precisely because it was ultimately just transpiled to JavaScript which has just massively bigger issues that lack of putting types next to vars. Granted, the same could be said about pretty much every other typed and compiled language "why bother with the type system in Rust" when it will just be compiled down to bytecode/assembly (which are almost type-less). And that's exactly why it makes more sense in a compiled language. Compiled. Not Transpiled.

[@holmybeer]

No. CPython (the main implementation of python, by the python foundation) doesn't have JIT. There are some niche runtimes that do, but amazingly, in most cases it's worse than CPython

[@aabluedragon]

12:24 Steve Carell voice moment

[@FrederikSchumacher]

14:44 Python *has types* and is a *typed language*. It's just that the *values* are typed, not the variables. And it's as good a feature as go interfaces.

[@furinick]

>lack of static typing look inside >x:int = 1 >x="a" >>>ValueError

[@JanuszKrysztofiak]

Actually, Python has had incremental typing for a while and it is better than TypeScript in two ways: 1) it is not a separate superset of the language 2) its uses go beyond better intellisense and static type analysis but include context-specific metadata as well. The reference implementation of Python (CPython) does not have JIT. However, an alternative, JITted one exist (PyPy), but that introduces certain incompabilities, especially with native-code modules, so it is rather niche. There are also less ambitious approaches, such as marking individual functions, written in a subset of Python for jitting (numba). All in all, Python is good for things that have to launch fast, live short and do not involve number crunching that cannot be outsourced to native-code Python modules (such as numpy). By itself, Python is a much bigger memory hog than Java, Python objects (and practically everything in Python is an object) take an order of magnitude memory than Java object (and not everything is an object in Java). This is somewhat obscured by the fact Java GCs like to reserve large chunks of memory to optimize performance (the speed of allocations, lower latency etc.) and Hotspot (JIT) has non-trivial memory needs to do caching (you can see its impact when you run a Java app with JIT turned off). Python is not single-threaded the same way JS is. In Python you are free to use OS threads, it in the standard lib. However, a naive use of threads in Python won't bring much of a performance gain (often contrary) due to the Global Interpreter Lock. However, not all code in Python is Python and suffers from GIL, GIL can be turned off in Cython code or not present at all in Python modules written directly in C, C++ or Rust. So in their case there will be gain. There will be also gain in IO-bound code (but here it would propably make sense to use asyncio, instead of blocking calls in new threads). Not all implementations of Python have GIL, so in their case threads can be used as usual.

[@wdavid3116]

Python has it's downsides but it's utility for large and/or performance intensive applications is undervalued. Performance wise the key element is that CPython is not meant to be performant. Rather python's extremely simple and powerful interoperability with C/C++ is intended to be used. You're supposed to use python and then convert the hot spots in your code to C/C++ modules. Not all use cases are served by this approach for sure but a lot more than the article gives credit for. Python is also used lot in web applications where there is dramatically more CPU horsepower than is needed to max out a system's network IO capacity. So you might be wasting electricity but you shouldn't have to waste performance in most use cases. As for large applications python doesn't have guard rails to keep people in line that is for sure. Monkey patching is awesome and powerful but should really only ever be used for short term fixes that get cleaned up quickly afterwards. That being said Dropbox was built using python and the reason they moved away was the issue with requiring C/C++ modules for performance and the extra cost and difficulty in hiring programmers who could code proficiently in both languages. I'd argue that you're going to hit issues with large projects and the tools you use are only likely to change what those issues look like.

[@petersmythe6462]

So here's the question: what if you need to solve a problem AND performance matters? Like, how much does performance need to matter before it makes sense to switch from a Python to something like C#, which still has fully automated memory management and such but runs at speeds much more comparable to other languages?

[@peter8261]

It is nice to write out something in a paragraph of Python instead of a novel of Java.

[@disgruntledtoons]

Python is the new BASIC. You use it for testing new ideas. If you need better performance, then you re-implement in a more performant language.

[@ulrich-tonmoy]

we use typescript because the editor we use is not intelligent enough to give us what type of variable it is when we are using a variable declared on another file

[@zaunn1236]

KZbin is built with python

[@SXsoft99]

lets be serious, sometimes speed doesn't matter, you dont need c, c++, rust, you need to get the project up faster

[@ChasmChaos]

Especially when creating a discord bot.

[@spookycat4620]

plus why chain yourself to one language be a chad and learn em all

[@tzimisce1753]

Cython has both optional static typing and faster performance than Java and C++. You can achieve up to 10x faster runtime with it compared to Java and C++. The comparisons depend on what you're doing of course, but I've measured it first-hand. There's even JIT versions like Numba, PyPy and there's Taichi for CPU/GPU-specificity and parallel computation. PyPy got its data science libraries covered recently, so it has very good coverage now compared to in 2019. Even vanilla Python is making improvements; 3.11 was 35% faster than 3.10. And 3.12 was 4% faster than 3.11. I still keep C++, C and Golang in my toolbelt for enterprise software, but there's no beating Python's development speed, prototyping, low verbosity and ease of use for unskilled teams. And for data science, there's no better language imo (R is too inflexible, less libraries and even slower AFAIK). If Python was to take Cython as its standard distro, simplify that syntax a little bit, and add static typing - no other language would be able to parry.

[@DylanBeaudry]

Could you explain what you mean by, "simplify that syntax"?

[@tzimisce1753]

@@DylanBeaudry Make wrappers for the C variable declarations, so it's less verbose and more Pythony.

[@emjizone]

12:58 You can't argue with what you can't read. 😂 That discard a lot of people. There are people who can read this, but they spend so much time checking that their answer is mathematically correct that the guy who asked them already got bored and took off.

[@LukeWatts85]

I think the"Median hours to solve a problem" in perl isn't accounting for all the "perl" you have to do first...as a gratefully EX-perl developer

[@jackdeespadas]

I would love to see prime have a chat with the python creator.

[@salomonmetre2117]

"Lisp is clearly used to tell other people that you program in Lisp" 😂😂🤣

[@tonywtyt]

I think this goes back to the idea that you don't use one single language to do everything. You obviously can't script a quick utility up in C/C++. For JS, I can remember the time when you just wrote it. Now you have any choice of bundlers and preprocessor for this that and the other thing for JS, and some of that for handling typescript. Then you add single-page app libraries to choose from. It doesn't take me long to get lost in React code!

[@hongtaoyang3759]

I challenge all those who says python is slow to use whatever tools they want, and write a matrix multiplication function that is faster than Numpy's `matmul`. Yes python is slow but a lot of the slow parts have already been replaced by the fastest frameworks written in C, C++ or Rust. Numpy, Scipy, Tensorflow, Pytorch are some of the prime examples, others include pydantic (powered by Rust), tokenizers (powered by rust) and more. I think python is becoming a "front-end" because of it is user friendly and easy to learn, while the "back-end" has been selectively replaced by faster languages. As a developer, I only need to interact with the "front-end" python and still enjoy the performance boost given by C and Rust under the hood.

[@ResidentO]

Big problem with performance that people don’t mention - your program is way more likely to be slow because of poor design rather than language limitations. And it’s way easier to write a faster program when it’s easier to write, understand and maintain your code.