dannyman.toldme.com

Danny Howard

<SmooveB> danny, your “why python sucks” entry is wrong.
<SmooveB> you can type pydoc function
<SmooveB> or pydoc lib.function
<dman> dbt: Yes.
<SmooveB> in fact, pydoc is better than perldoc
<Ark> of course it is!
<dman> dbt: But the documentation sucks in comparison to perldoc.
<Ark> its python!
<Ark> python is like europe
<Ark> everything is better!
<SmooveB> because you don’t have to know perldoc -f for built in functions.
<SmooveB> Ark: wank wank knee jerk wank wank :)
* dman jerks off.
<SmooveB> dman: what are you talking about?
<Ark> hey, if I’m gonna constnatly give Matt shit about not liking stuff
     because said stuff is popular
<Ark> I’m just gonna constantly bang on python
<Ark> and your mother
<M> SAY NUC-U-LAR!!! SAY IT, BITCH…OHH!! OHH!! YESSSSS!!!!1
<Ark> cuz really, what else do I have to do all day but be Eliza-like in my
     mocking?
<dman> I was frustrated I think becauise I wanted to do something with a
     linked list or something. It was long ago … anyway, Perl
     documentation is very good, and you can usually pull up great stuff on
     the command line. I was finding that Python equivalents were terse
     little things of a few lines at most leaving much to ambiguity.
<dman> Like, what is a Python function related to list or array management?
<Ark> I am pissed at the lack of documentation in Roma v0.3
<Ark> s/Roma/Rome/
<Ark> damn sun code
* dman shrugs.
<SmooveB> dman: pydoc list
<dman> Today we are checking backlinks for funness. :)
<SmooveB> builtin types have named types that you can look up docs for. :)
<Ark> I think I shall go to Borders
<dman> | pop(…)
<dman> | L.pop([index]) -> item — remove and return item at index
     (default last)
<dman> 2-10:13 djh@ratchet ~> perldoc -f pop
<dman> =item pop ARRAY
<dman> =item pop
<dman> Pops and returns the last value of the array, shortening the array by
<dman> one element. Has an effect similar to
<dman> $ARRAY[$#ARRAY--]
<dman> If there are no elements in the array, returns the undefined value
<dman> (although this may happen at other times as well). If ARRAY is
<dman> omitted, pops the C<@ARGV> array in the main program, and the C<@_>
<dman> array in subroutines, just like C<shift>.
<dman> (for purely arbitrary example)
<SmooveB> ok, the extra documentation is mostly centered around perl’s
     terminally weird syntax and stupid implicit argument behavior.
<dman> Uh huh.
<dman> What happens if you pop a non-existent index?
<dman> What happens if you pop an empty array?
<dman> We do not know unless we try.
<dman> What exception will be thrown?
<dman> What is a similar way of going about the same thing?
<Ark> I really would like to learn the python
<Ark> I should just say “okay, instead of doing this in <foo> i’ll do this in
     python”
<Ark> next project
<Ark> next scripting project, that is
<dman> The online Perl documentation has proved more accessible for me than
     the python equivalent.
<dman> Dave, Keith, may I blog this? :)
<Ark> what’s that?
<SmooveB> “blog this”
<Ark>      Writer w = response.getWriter();
<Ark>      SyndFeedOutput output = new SyndFeedOutput();
<Ark>      output.output(feed, w);
<Ark> hooray for dumb looking sample code!
<dman> See last comment at
     http://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/02/19/why-python-sucks/
<dman> HAHAHAHAHA I AM LAME

free-zombie

lol. This is top-on-google for “python sucks”. And this is lame. Proof that python rocks, right ?

Ben

If Python doesn’t suck, then why do 50% of the Python programs I try to run (on several Linux distros, FreeBSD and Mac OS X) die with a stack trace?

thedonvaughn

so is this site about big pythons? I love pythons. They are big. They are pythons. My python ate my mother’s perls. The python than poop out the perls. Silly Big python…. it’s funny how it embarrasses the perl.

flamoot

It’s the book

Someguy

Perl > Python by far. It has much better documentation and is more common sense in my opinion.

matt

I thought I was smart and pretty decent at programming until I spent the last several days, surrounded by books, trying to learn python. Don’t get me wrong, I could easily entertain a 6-year old with my IDLE interpreter antics. I’ve even built a GUI and blah blah blah. But there is an anoying “spin” (read: lie) about the “ease of Python.” Here are the significant issues (from the standpoint of a business owner who just wants a robust and very quick solution to web and desktop applications):
1- There is virtually no documentation. This whole thread began with someone saying they couldn’t find documentation and that is the crucial problem. For those of you who disagree, look in the mirror–you’re taking for granted how much you know. And for the rest of us, it’s very very difficult to find a simple requirement like, what are the arguments i need to pass to a simple function?
2- Data Typing is not handled eloquently. It seems to be transparent at first, but unclear data types in python have led me to some very difficult to debug code (even when I seemed to explicitly type my variables).
3- Python has no GUI. Oh I know you’re going to blog that there are dozens of them from Tkinter to Qt to Wx etc. But those have crappy documentation, no matter how powerful they are. I managed to crank out a few GUI’s, but just the GUI itself took days on what would have taken less than 20 minutes in Visual Studio. (Don’t misunderstand, I despise MS World- But if you value your time as much as your money, it makes sense to use VS. I’ve already spent more on the API Python Wing and unhelpful Python books than I would have spent just buying Visual Studio outright).
4- Python is not free. You’ll spend a gazillion hours trying to figure out some documentation that would have simply popped up on the screen in VS. And the books. I’ve personally put Mark Lutz’s kids thru school with his Python books. And the web tutorials are well-intended but, for my level worthless. And don’t go off thinking I’m some lame beginner. I’ve created several very successful businesses and programmed much of the software that keeps them running at a high level.
5- Python is not intuitive. Sure you can write some apparently readable code at the interpreter. But take a bird’s eye view of some fairly simple code in the basic python modules…there’s nothing remotely readable about it. My dog can do some amusing tricks but I wouldn’t let him drive my car.

Just a Developer

Joe Krahn said:
> Perl has it’s own problems. Object oriented features are a hack,
> and even well-formatted code can look rather cryptic. The
> documentation is much better just because it has been around
> much longer than Python. It is also much faster, probably for the same reason.

1. Perl is not faster, either not produce smaller code, if you want get
things right. Well, with Perl actually you can produce smaller sources
by GZIP’int em all, and most important that readability of the source
after compressing won’t change that much… :-)

2. Perl also has lack of exception handling. There are Error module,
which is basically a hack and workaround, which does not catches
properly lot of things. Well, even trivial things, like division by zero.

3. Perl’s built-in regular expression support is significantly different
that what most other languages provide. It makes Perl very powerful
tool while parsing text documents. However, this is very strong
disadvantage of Perl with none of counterweighting advantages while
working with XML (which is NOT a text!) and other complex data structures.

4. Standard library in Perl is absent, strictly saying. The rest is in CPAN.
To maintain such system, in some cases turns to be nightmare at
commercial production.

In short, the place of this rubbish lister is in museum. Perl6 is vaporware
and Python/Ruby, both of them beats Perl at Unix SA field these days.

> I would rather use something less cryptic than Perl, but without the fragile
> and annoying indentation rules of Python.
Python idents aren’t that fragile. They could be annoying, but using
correct editor and writing in correct way, Python is fine.

Maybe you want to read this nice posting:
http://www.secnetix.de/~olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk

Brianary

@Just a Developer:

1. If you say so. There are differing posts about this online, and I’d wager that the two are at about the same order of magnitude in terms of speed, in general.
2. Wrong.

  eval {
    ....
  };

  if ($@) {
    if ($@->isa('MyFileException')) {  # Specific exception handler
      ....
    }
    else { # Generic exception handler
      ....
    }
  }

3. Examples, please? I don’t believe this is true. For the most part, other languages copy Perl. Who had RegEx first?
4. There is a standard library, depending on the distro of Perl you use. And maintaining CPAN modules is only a nightmare if you frighten easily. ;) There’s a whole module for easy module maintenance (CPAN). I imagine that this is something Python programmers will claim is a liability until PyPAN is ready.

I haven’t used Perl for serious programming in years, but when I need to quickly rename a bunch of files, massage some data, &c., Perl is indispensable.

I like Python’s indent-blocks. That’s part of what has drawn me to learn it, but I am also runnning into the lack of documentation, and it could cause me to walk away. Don’t dismiss Perl docs with “ok, the extra documentation is mostly centered around perl’s terminally weird syntax and stupid implicit argument behavior.”, because that’s just stupid and subjective. Read some Perl docs and see if that’s really the case. In fact, pick 20 common features and compare the docs to Python’s, and see what I mean. pydoc is nice, and I really like the local web server feature, but there’s just no CONTENT there.

The thing that is really throwing me is that there is no easy way to do something as simple as parsing an RFC 1123 or RFC 822 datetime value, which are used in email/MIME, HTTP, RSS, &c. This is a BIG hole. When people complain about the fact that strptime ignores timezones, Guido himself just points the finger at C, as if that’s an acceptable excuse. If you can’t parse a standard date format, fixing that should be a top priority.

Also, what’s up with repr() vs. str()? That’s bizarre.

Scott Wimer

I came here via ‘pydoc sucks’.

I wrote a validation helper library from some Django code I was working on, dutifully writing doc strings for each helper and a docstring header.

When I try to view it with pydoc though, it barfs because it can’t find a django module that my library uses.

I don’t want my doc viewer to execute my code; I want it to extract and format documentation.

If your code writes to a file in the top level, then reading its docs via pydoc will create, or delete, or whatever files. That’s really suboptimal.

ron_paulite

Python is slow.

Whenever somebody says Python is slow, Python fans would say that Python, being an interpreted language, will always be slower than compiled languages. Or they would say Python is fast enough

The PROBLEM is Python is slower than PHP.

Just go to any Python website and you will know.

An example is:
http://www2.ljworld.com/
And this site is created by the creators of Django!

And it is not just this Python site that is slow. There are many many Python sites which are very slow. And please don’t say that it could be the web hosting or the server which is slow — because when so many Python sites are slower than PHP sites, it couldn’t be the web hosting.

Also, Zope/Plone is even slower.

Python is slow. Very slow.

Sure, Python is definitely a more advanced and powerful language than PHP. But what’s the point if it is slow. And contrary to what Python fans like to say, Python is not an easy language to program in. And it is definitely not easier to write Python web applications as compared to PHP.

Python sucks. Python is slow.

Torsten Bronger

There are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.

And the worst benchmark all is a person just browsing the Web and listening to his “feeling”.

The *serious* benchmarks other people did show that — of course — Python has the same speed than PHP whithin the error span. Most even see an advantage for Python.

BTW, those Web framework benchmarks are really superfluous. Unless one framework is not one order of magnitude slower than the others — and none of the significant is — it’s simply unimportant. Look at the hype with Rails although it *is* slowest until we get the YARV in the upcoming Ruby release.

anonymous

Dear ron_paulite,

Python is not slower than php. It is the other way around.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=python&lang2=php

Click there and you will see in almost all tests, php lags heavily behind python.

It is also faster than perl.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=python&lang2=perl

mike

oops that should say “function_name”? didn’t realize it would hide the angle bracketed text

Doug

I can write perl in my sleep. I’m just learning python. Somehow I found this. Python whitespace is mostly a non issue. Not better. Not worse. Different. For myself, I like to put temporary debug print statements flush left…guess I’ll have to change that habit with Python. Ok, that does suck. But in case you haven’t figured it out by now, ALL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES SUCK(tm). Perl, Python. They suck equally, in different ways. Now get back to work.

Kilroy

Yes, Python is a very powerful language BUT it is also very slow!
And I am not comparing it with C or other compiled language or statically typed language. Python is also slow compared to other dynamically typed interpretive languages.

It is okay for PHP and ASP to be slow because PHP and ASP do not claim to be powerful or advanced languages and they are easy to learn. But Python claims to be an advanced language. Advanced and yet so slow????

Trimbo

I love that I typed in “Python Sucks” and your blog came up first.

LOL.

Andrei

I’m a programmer with 13+ years experience in web and desktop applications, and I use Python on occasions (not for the language itself, but for some applications written in Python).

I don’t recall seeing a programming language more hectic that Python. It looks like an April’s Fool joke that caught on with the public, like a hack that people just don’t let go.

I spent a few days reading some books about it and I got pretty good with it, but in many parts I consider it a hack. You want some examples, I assume:
– lists: add an item: append/insert method; get+remove an item: pop method (strange name matching)
– lists: add an item: append/insert method; remove an item: del STATEMENT (that’s right, not a method, but a statement)
– lists: add an item: append/insert method; get the size: len FUNCTION (that’s right, not a method, but a standalone function)
– iterate over items: for dicts use the iteritems method, for lists use the enumerate function
– and many others.

I like programming languages which are either brief, or well designed (so that you can “guess” how API calls will look like before you read about them, by extrapolating your previous experience in that language). Python is none of that. Moreover, IMHO it’s widespread use in Linux’s desktop apps is even hurting Linux’s image as a good desktop OS.

Now the good part: I like Python’s whitespaces matter approach. Again, it has some design problems, but it’s nice.