ITT "I fell for the Python Meme " (tl;dr to follow)
I've been a "professional programmer" ( Python babby ) for about three years now. I originally learned the language because Eric S. Raymond recommended it in his "so you want to be a hacker" article which I read as a teenager about 10 years ago. It would probably be fair to say I've spent 5000+ hours either writing or reading Python.
Today I've realized what a massive mistake I've made. I stuck with it for so long because Python is pretty readable and occupies a local maximum of efficacy in the space of languages optimized for solving trivial problems at a premium performance and memory cost. But as soon as you try to do anything non-trivial, that vaunted "readable" quality of Python evaporates in a magic puff of smoke. Because you lack proper facilities for functional programming ( e.g. non broken lambdas, usable builtin support for AST transformation, quote-unquote mechanisms for macros ); trying to mould python into a shape that fits a non-trivial problem feels quite a lot like trying to sculpt an attractive bust out of play-doh. A tallented artist can pull it off but it is frustrating as fuck. Guido had a retarded vendetta against functional programming paradigms, so if you're trying to force your Python code to use them you end up having to resort to some untransparant fudge ike MacroPy or RedBaron.
Your only option, really, is to use classes, and even then to make sure your classes are individually retarded so that their interactions can be predictable. This leads to a simple idea often producing 10 or more classes to support it, and a linear increase in problem complexity or functionality implies either an exponential increase in source lines, or an expontential increase in the time investment per line.
A programmer who wants to express a complex idea will be fighting against Python's paint-by-numbers way of doing things every single step of the way. [1/2]
So my advice to any of you younger guys learning Python or other trendy interpreted languages is to STRONGLY consider how much your programming language is asking you to take for granted. The more of that there is, the more of the "easy" work it does for you, the more you can rest assured that for difficult tasks you're sent sailing up shit creek with no paddle.
Python and other languages like it that care more about cute syntactic constructions that make code more readable in the scope of a dozen or so lines, but do nothing fo you beyond that, induce literal brain-damage. I am not kidding. You will adapt your thoughts and the scope of the projects you're willing to confront according to what "feels" reasonable and doable, and this "feeling" is in the case of Python usually accompanied by nausea.
tl;dr I climbed the hill of Python only to discover the himalayas infront of me. Fuck Python!
Asher Foster
gonna fap to this
Joseph Thomas
Any Python program over 100 lines should be rewritten in Bash, because that way you won't fool yourself into thinking it's production quality
John Robinson
This is precisely the reason I want to learn python. I am training to be a network admin so I pretty much am never going to try to write out my own big programs from scratch, but automation of scriptable tasks is perfect for me and python can do it well without me having to get balls deep in a program language. After python and bash I dont know that I will spend any more time learning programming languages simply because my time would be better spent mastering the network side. But thats just my hot take and I could be totally misguided.
Brody Phillips
>ESR >recommanding python Holy fuck, now that's retardation. Well, he was a big Perl hacker back in the day, so that may explain it. But really, from the start, I wanted to do nothing but low-level programming, that is, working my way from C to C++ (despite hating Sepples, but in big teams, that's how you manage idiocy it seems, even though I don't agree, but I digress). When you finally get to work in the embedded systems field, you see how much damage Python can make. There is a big meme in the industry that forces Python as the language for quick prototyping. The code produced is so low quality and so slow that you'll have to rewrite it wholly for production. Why not take shortcuts and prototype in C already? You won't lose weeks making that code production-quality that way. It's incredible how Python teaches non-programmers how not to program. I'm almost inclined to say that this is exactly what makes Python so attractive to them.
Sebastian Bailey
?
Justin Price
Try C# targeting dotnet core. It's comfy and reasonably high level, but it has everything you need to drop into performance hackery when you need it, it's truly multi-paradigm, and the tooling/support is phenomenal.
Scalies in general are sexy. I prefer the top half to be non-human as well though.
Michael Lopez
>C(++) >low level think about this realistically. Do you want to be a computer engineer? Then sure, C(++) is the way to go. Embedded? It depends (just make sure you know VHDL or other hardware descritpive langs). Do you want to write bytecode? Shit outta luck my dude, i hope you know fucking hexadecimal. Assembly is for the rare instance where you need to make something in C faster, but by no means can you call C "low level" when its compiled and not assembled.
Gavin Ward
> Scalies in general are sexy. I prefer the top half to be non-human as well though. go back
