Re:How to protect your career from a ChatGPT Future
by medler on Saturday February 25, 2023 @09:11AM
(#34936793)
The Python honeymoon period lasts a long time. For me it lasted until the monolith I was working on had grown to ~500k lines of code. At that scale the smallest changes would cause (seemingly) unrelated breakage, despite many thousands of tests saying all was good. Python’s “anything is anything” philosophy made me miss the predictability of C and Java. Granted, that was before type annotations had taken off so maybe things are better nowadays.
Re:How to protect your career from a ChatGPT Future
by Yoric on Saturday February 25, 2023 @10:05AM
(#34937177)
Type annotations... help. They're not great, but they're better than nothing.
Re:How to protect your career from a ChatGPT Future
by inglor_cz on Saturday February 25, 2023 @11:46AM
(#34938026)
PyCharm handles them really well and I am happy that I started with Python 3.11.
Re:How to protect your career from a ChatGPT Future
by Yoric on Monday February 27, 2023 @12:10PM
(#34958996)
I should elaborate that when I write "better than nothing", I'm someone with a background in strongly-typed programming languages (OCaml, Haskell, Rust) and even more strongly-typed programming languages (Idris, Coq, Twelf).
It's unlikely that Python type annotations will ever be able to achieve something comparable to what many of these languages had during the 90s. They're useful, but if you need strong static safety guarantees, Python is the wrong tool for the task.
I would say quite explicitly that Python is a lot better than C, at least as long as you value pure concentration on the business logic of whatever you are implementing. Its libraries are helpful, huge and well documented.
I am overjoyed by the fact that I don't have to a) either reinvent the wheel myself (e.g. writing a JSON parser from scratch) or b) rely on some OSS library with a bus factor of 1, whenever I just need to store or read data etc.