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Python 3.6 Released (python.org)
On Friday, more than a year after Python 3.5, core developers Elvis Pranskevichus and Yury Selivanov announced the release of version 3.6. An anonymous reader writes:
InfoWorld describes the changes as async in more places, speed and memory usage improvements, and pluggable support for JITs, tracers, and debuggers. "Python 3.6 also provides support for DTrace and SystemTap, brings a secrets module to the standard library [to generate authentication tokens], introduces new string and number formats, and adds type annotations for variables. It also gives us easier methods to customize the creation of subclasses."
You can read Slashdot's interview with Python creator Guido van Rossum from 2013. I also remember an interview this July where Perl creator Larry Wall called Python "a pretty okay first language, with a tendency towards style enforcement, monoculture, and group-think...more interested in giving you one adequate way to do something than it is in giving you a workshop that you, the programmer, get to choose the best tool from." Anyone want to share their thoughts today about the future of Python?
You can read Slashdot's interview with Python creator Guido van Rossum from 2013. I also remember an interview this July where Perl creator Larry Wall called Python "a pretty okay first language, with a tendency towards style enforcement, monoculture, and group-think...more interested in giving you one adequate way to do something than it is in giving you a workshop that you, the programmer, get to choose the best tool from." Anyone want to share their thoughts today about the future of Python?
Python enforces a single form and this is its strength. It makes everyone write readable code. I know this vexes the special snowflakes but it is for the greater good.
Syntactic whitespace makes me twitch, too; but it neatly resolves many of the codestyle hubbub issues you see in other language environments.
If your editor helps you do the right thing, it's just an aesthetic whine, and shouldn't be worth arguing about.
IMHO, curly braces are braindead (unless used in a math context to denote sets, which is the one true way). Now can I also get a +5 Insightful for my equally valid personal opinion?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Most written languages do exactly that, why not Python?
It works just fine as long as you're not silly enough to use a word processor as a text editor.
And if you're sensible enough to use tabs, you can even change the spacing to suit personal preferences and visual acuity.
Using tabs for indentation is a mental disease.
Um, why? Tab exists solely to provide indentation.
The total math geeks I know really prefer python, though.
That's because of the good math libraries available, it has nothing to do with the language itself. Remember R is popular among mathematicians, and from a language viewpoint, it's a crap language. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, though.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Enforced indentation enhances readability. Perhaps you've never run into any godawful code where the programmer decided to follow his own arbitrary indentation system.
You don't have to do everything on a single line in Python. Where'd you get that idea? You can split statements across lines just fine. Most Python programmers do so.
First, I know Javascript is wildly more popular as the language that runs everywhere, but it's not what most people use when they're writing a system / glue script - though some people do, they've got a hammer.
Python's the utility / glue scripting language of choice precisely because it's READABLE - it doesn't have nine different ways to do everything like Perl does which makes it less expressive but more comprehensible and maintainable. You can definitely bang stuff out faster in Perl, but you can come back to the Python four years later and easily figure out what it's doing (just did that recently, fixed a large four year old 2.x script for new requirements and features and upgraded it to Python 3.x in a day, most of that testing), or grab someone else's Python and maintain it with reasonable effort unless they were seriously defective. Terrible programmers can write Perl in Python, and great programmers can write very maintainable code in Perl, but the language heavily skews the odds.
Remember when Ruby briefly seemed like a contender for Python? Well, it was neat, and decent enough (I used it), but it had too many perlisms (punctuation vomit syntax) which made it similarly not so readable, and then all the magpies flew away to the next hotness and I went back to Python as more maintainable - and more capable because of the strong library support. And now Ruby is just 'That language you use for Rails'.
Similarly, people like to bitch about the whitespace, but it forces readability. Perl people considered cramming 5 or more lines worth of Python on a single line a bragging point, and it was when vertical space was limited, but it's hell for readability and maintainability and we've got big monitors now. And if you have any code skills at all the whitespace is not a problem - I do Python, C#, C++, bash, Haskell, ASM, and VHDL - all wildly different, and the biggest problem is remembering how each does '# of items in a collection' (Count? count? Count()? Length? length? sizeof()?) - whitespace is not even on the radar.
A more valid complaint is that Python has relentlessly marched towards cleaning itself up even if that breaks compatibility - it is not afraid to clean up terrible mistakes it has made (usually on new features) rather than leaving them in forever for compatibility reasons like bash has to. I know that's a big sticking point - it can be jarring when old code breaks, but locking old code you don't have the time to maintain to a specific version has worked pretty well for us. Mostly that's just segregating things as 2.x or 3.x. Code we have kept up to latest version has improved as a result as the language improves.
Biggest weakness - the lack of compile time checks due to strong but dynamic typing continues to be an Achilles heel for any large project. Python (and other scripting languages) just aren't suited for that and we don't use it for that. Use something with static compile-time checking like C# or C++ - yes, after all my kvetching about readability we still use C++ for some things because nothing else fills its niche.
Because human readability of code is much more important than machine readability of code. With a suitable parser, the machine will be able to read the code. The art is in creating a language in which the program is obvious to many humans, not just the person who wrote it.
IMHO Python is on the right track for that. The best way to ensure all programs written in a programming language are readable by many people is to have the language enforce a uniform style, with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. People who don't like the language-author's enforced style conventions can use another language. Programs written in the language will be reliably readable and maintainable, and that's way more important than giving freedom of artistic impression to the program writer.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?