/prog/ - What's bad about Python?

Name: Anonymous 2005-12-21 8:09

Because I'm learning it, almost done through the tutorial, and it looks great.

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 20:08

What's bad about Python?

Python is, on average, 35 times slower than equivalent C/C++ code, as much as 150 times slower for certain tasks on single-threaded problems. It get's worse with concurrency, where on threaded benchmarks running on quad-core machines, it can be as much as 450 times slower. The CPython implementation (the main canonical implementation of Python) has no thread-scalability except with asynchronous I/O, due to the global interpreter lock.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 20:15

>>49
That's CPython's fault (and by extension, that of its partly braindead designer). But yes, CPython's performance and lack of proper multithreading are sickening. Let's not even mention the retarded GC.

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 20:19

Python has too many non-orthogonal features. Principally is dictionaries and objects. Why have both? It's object model is silly: why have both types and duck-typing? What the fuck is that for? It's as if all its used for is isInstance and friends, since the way Python does inheritance, it's easy to do just as well with functions that insert methods into dictionaries. If it's just gonna hash a string anyway, then why bother carrying around a type? This isn't CLOS for fuck's sake -- it's not actually dispatching methods on types.

I also don't like the relationship between Python's syntax and semantics. Little things like the way generators work (put this keyword here and it drastically changes the meaning of the surrounding code!) and the way self is magically passed to methods and the way class bodies are pseudo-closures but not really.

Speaking of generators: fuck em! they are coroutine's retarded cousin, which are continuation's retarded brother.

I also don't like the gimped anonymous functions. the fuck is that.

I also don't like auto-local scope and the "nonlocal" keyword or whatever that nonsense is. Just have lexical scope like JavaScript and Lua, fuck.

In general I don't like the syntax. Big single-liners that can't be broken up are annoying. Why is there ":" in the syntax if it almost always has a newline after it?

There are things I like about Python, but not enough to make me want to use it for anything.

tl;dr: if it ain't Lisp, it's crap.

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 20:31

Python is poorly designed and has no excuse.

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 20:37

>>51
tl;dr: if it ain't Lisp, it's crap.
What if it's Scala or Haskell?

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 20:52

>>51
they are coroutine's retarded cousin, which are continuation's retarded brother.
Continuations that aren't limited to one shot often result in excessive stack copying (because even if it already fired, you still have to keep around a clean copy of the entire fucking stack in case someone decides to fire it again). You don't want that now, do you?

I agree with everything else in your post, except for
tl;dr: if it ain't Lisp, it's crap.
Will you please fuck off and die already you piece of shit spammer.

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 21:38

python is __ugly__. I would rather use Lua or Ruby.

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 22:56

>>54
u mad

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 23:02

>>34
What, have you've tied your identity so much to your favorite language you can't bear to hear criticism? It's just a language.
Programmers do this with everything. I don't understand why.

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 23:21

>>54
Will you please fuck off and die already you piece of shit spammer.

If it ain't a joke, you're getting it.

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-19 23:40

>>51
Principally is dictionaries and objects. Why have both?
JS got that right.
I also don't like the gimped anonymous functions. the fuck is that.
That also breaks the ``def f(...1): ...2 is sugar for f = lambda ...1: ...2'', which simplifies the language and the implementation.

>>54
Continuations that aren't limited to one shot often result in excessive stack copying (because even if it already fired, you still have to keep around a clean copy of the entire fucking stack in case someone decides to fire it again). You don't want that now, do you?
That's one way to implement them. There are better ways, and delimited continuations can be less expensive to implement because it just partially copies ``the stack'', and they're more expressive than undelimited continuations.

Name: Anonymous 2011-07-20 1:11

If you're using Python, you're using shit.