I agree with most of this, but I would argue that the 2->3 transition was on balance a mistake. Python 3 is better, but not better enough to justify the huge amount of time and resources that otherwise could have been spent on better performance, typing, packaging, tools, etc. I'd gladly trade the Python 3 improvements for Python 2 equivalents of TypeScript and V8.
Re:Rust – A hard decision pays off
by cmrdporcupine on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:18PM
(#32583581)
You are probably right, I'm not invested in enough in that ecosystem to know one way or another. I do know lots of things remain disrupted by this transition in ways that still personally inconvenience me.
I read "CGI" as computer generated imagery, python was a strong glue language in this field in the 90s.
Also I think people misread 'python speed', few c++ masters said it was more about prototyping to converge on good overall design rather than suffering the efforts of early iterations in c++ (90s c++).
Re:Rust – A hard decision pays off
by cmrdporcupine on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @10:42PM
(#32588791)
Definitely in the context of the times, Python was more pleasant overall for initial prototyping than any static typed alternatives, including Java.
I still use it for quick one-off scripts to "do things" with bits of data and so on. And as a calculator.
> They only give you the illusion of fast prototyping. You just shift your time to fixing type and binding errors later in your dev cycle.
That is the perfect way to describe it! And sometimes you’re out of the dev cycle and into production if your test suite didn’t hit all cases.
Story -- I was a very early adopter of Python, back in the mid-90s. When other people wrote their CGI scripts in Perl, I always reached for Python. The first paid gig I ever had was a CGI script ("resume builder") I wrote in Python in 1996. But almost nobody was using it back then, and I'd get quizzical stares from people in job interviews etc. when it came up.
So for many years back then I really really wanted to get a job working in Python. And I was super excited to get a job around the 2001 time frame in it on a pretty cool embedded Linux project.
But my first experience working in a large codebase was disappointing. I could see right away that once many developers started working in that codebase together, best practices were really hard to enforce, and things started to fall apart into a bit of a mess, and lots of problems just showed up at runtime in bad explosions. That was the beginning of my disenchantment with dynamically typed, late-bound languages. They only give you the illusion of fast prototyping. You just shift your time to fixing type and binding errors later in your dev cycle.
Python really improved a lot with the 2->3 transition, and the community has much better best practices now. But I think the core problem with late bound languages remains.
All that said, I'm currently in another window working for my current employer wiring an embedded CPython interpreter into a Rust-based runtime...