Everyone’s welcome to their opinion of course, but I find Python more readable than anything else and I resent the visual clutter required to make intentions plain in other languages. Feels like having a conversation where people say the words “comma”, “period”, etc.
I also spend more time with Python than anything else and I suspect these two facts about me relate, lol
Sounds much like PowerBI, which I can’t say I’ve used much directly. But every time we use it, because the client likes the idea and it can theoretically do “all the business intelligence” natively…we eventually find it can only do 80% of what they actually want, which completely removes its single advantage and forces us to go custom anyway. We’ve stopped offering it, to be clear.
Couldn’t agree more. Field service is one hell of a drug. Money’s good, variety is fun, the chaos and travel are fun too, and you learn a lot quickly. The latter often because some or all of the mfg. plant you’re visiting needs you to fix your stuff so they can run, and no one is coming to BFE to help you, lol.
But that all wears off, in time, and it starts to take a huge toll like you described. Never met a long term field service engineer with a healthy home life, or with their health in general. I got out because both of mine were crumbling, for real.
Ah, alcoholic then
I really credit my present strength with Python, in at least a small part, to PyCharm. Really a great IDE for Python projects. It irritates me, if anything, how much more flexible VSCode can be for non-Python stuff. I end up using VSCode.
Yeah, it’s certainly not a perfect model :) and I will absolutely acknowledge that some folks seem to delight in their own smugness and knowledge and seem to enjoy opportunities to shit on someone. The way the platform works probably amounts to a certain “gravity” pulling those personalities in, TBH.
It’s mainly a different model, but I totally sympathize that it’s the opposite of welcoming or encouraging.
SO recognizes that many, many questions are really just rephrasings of the same underlying question, and the aim is to find and provide the best answer to those. It explicitly does not want to repeatedly answer the same question, and given how few people find out how it works before simply asking, they have to be pretty ruthless about it. The result is that usually the most active and fleshed out questions and answers are very informative. So there’s a big upside in trade for those downsides. Answers are meant to be durable, ~singular, and authoritative.
Reddit is basically halfway between that, and Discord. Discord is the polar opposite, questions and answers are naturally ephemeral, duplication happens constantly, and quality of responses is all over the map.
I greatly prefer the StackOverflow model, and - to be very clear - I have never once asked (to say nothing of answering) a question of my own there, lmao.
One tremendous strength of Python no one has mentioned is its vast ecosystem of high quality packages. It’s not just the language features that speed up development, that ecosystem makes a huge difference.
Another (far more subjective) advantage is readability - when written according to Python’s (actually quite opinionated!) style guidelines and general software engineering best practices, Python is also extremely readable, which really facilitates teamwork. My software shop has transitioned to using Python for most things these days for that reason, away from JS, after seeing my work and code reviews, FWIW.
I’m not some wizardly dev, to be clear, but I’m this shop’s first senior dev specializing in Python. I write deliberately clean and readable Python and folks are really enjoying it - enough to voluntarily switch.
Performance is always listed as a Python drawback, and it’s not untrue, it’s just so overblown as a problem. It basically never causes me issues. Crucially, saving dev time is almost always the better choice compared to saving compute cycles. And I’d take that farther and say anyone junior enough to be wondering about Python and performance…is almost certainly working on tasks that Python is well suited to - better suited, than most other languages.
(Hopefully this was not too controversial, but I accept the risk of a flame war, as is tradition lol)
Edit: clarity
Utterly tone deaf, some of these guys, it’s amazing. Had a new CEO open a meeting shortly after he started with a story about visiting an apiary (bee farm) with his family. His unironic takeaway which he shared with us, somehow missing the poignant relevance of what he was saying - “It turns out the drones just don’t do very much”.
It was like he intended an ice breaker with a personal anecdote, and it started out fine, but he couldn’t help but just tell literally all of us how he really feels. Amazing.
'twas told to me that in many ways they refuse to cooperate with our system of taxonomy at large, too freaky to ever be properly pinned down
Whoops 😅
Nah, this seems like a big deal. Not necessarily “imminent doom for Twitter” big, but still. Social media platforms live and die on network effects, and none (that I’m aware of) has ever successfully “forced” their own viability without having naturally strong network effects.
Network effects work in favor of signups and engagement of course, but they work on the downswing too, they can accelerate abandonment and replacement.
What do you do instead for dynamic values that are needed at runtime and inappropriate to check in to version control?
I would love that! I do think there are probably interesting underlying personality factors / preferences for a lot of this stuff as well.
I do think that many of Python’s characteristics map to my own personality and I bet there’s something to that. Things like syntax of course, but not strictly syntax, also things like “The Zen of Python”, and the way its a “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none”. I also really kind of need the freedom and accompanying responsibility to break any “rules” on a whim (Python will happily let you overwrite its own internals while running, for instance), but I almost never do anything that uses it…
I could probably keep going lol. Feels like a “people looking like their pets” scenario, lmao