I've found that python isn't bad at all for smaller jobs, but larger ones, particularly resident ones, very often become problematic and need to be restarted, as they get slower and slower (memory fragmentation?)
I also know I'm not alone in noticing this. Pick any large python project, go to its bugs list. You'll find it there.
I'm not arguing that Python is not without its utility. I'm simply saying that it has been used in places where it shouldn't have been. In places where someone failed when they did the cost benefit analysis. Or- as an alternative hypothesis, we have simply decided that producing code is more important than how well the code runs. Perhaps we have just entered an era where quantity is more important than quality.
I hear ya, and I know we're just swapping anecdotes, but I've run into the opposite - one area where it has really shined for us is in the really big projects. These were projects that probably wouldn't have ever made it out in the door in a lower level language but Python helped us keep the complexity manageable, which in turn made ongoing maintenance manageable. One large project in particular is nearing the decade mark since it's first release and it has really aged well - it's been solidly plugging along all that time and we've been able to expand the feature set significantly throughout that time. Obviously Python isn't the only factor here, but it's been a huge positive factor.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion, have a great day!
Sure, it works. I've just found that where it works, you simply accept the tradeoffs.
Of course, but that's true of all languages. As an example: a good chunk of my career has been writing application servers, and years ago I stopped writing them in C/C++ because the development time was too long - with C I could squeeze out nearly every ounce of potential performance, but the cost of doing so was too high (time to dev as well as the resulting complexity). The Python versions were of course slower, but not drastically so (because the servers tended to be I/O bound anyway).
When performance is the main problem, it's often easy to move a small portion of an app to a language closer to the metal, without having to port the whole thing. Last month I finished up a desktop app that takes 3D room models and generates CAD files. I wrote the app in Python but found the performance was not up to snuff (no surprise), so I moved the heavy lifting (maybe 2-3% of the functionality) to C. Performance still wasn't where I wanted it, so I moved that to the GPU.
In terms of tradeoffs, I used Python to get the whole app working end-to-end much more quickly than I would have in some other languages (especially with the requirements changing out from under me a couple of times along the way), and then moved the little kernel of performance-critical stuff into something more suitable - paying the price for tradeoffs but doing it in a way where the cost-benefit ratio worked out pretty well.
I mean, I use Zenoss. It's an amazing product. The fact that it takes 5 minutes to start up on $4000 hardware, where Nagios does it in about 12 seconds is fine. We accept the trade-off.
Out of curiosity, is there any indication that the difference is actually due to Python?
Some amount of that could be just the sucky nature to lots of large software projects - we've probably all seen big projects go bad in any number of different languages.
Like I said to the other guy, if it's not for you, great. But there's really nothing in the language that makes it inherently bad for large projects (and lots of things that makes it good for them). We've used Python on a number of very large projects and it worked out well for us.
Language choice is fairly subjective, so if you don't like Python, that's cool. But there are a number of solid reasons why it has grown in popularity and it's not because it's something new - the language is almost 30 years old now. I've been using it for about 20 years now and for me it has been terrific for one-off utility scripts written by one person to huge projects with many developers at a couple of different Fortune 50 companies, and everything in between.
Many of the alleged reasons why Python would be unusable for certain scenarios (e.g. large projects) tend to be fallacies or more theoretical problems than actual problems.
The choice of programming language *always* involves tradeoffs. Python isn't the best tool for every job, but in many scenarios the benefits have outweighed the costs in a pretty lopsided manner. To each his own of course.
My cell and home ISP data caps are much higher than they were just a few years ago, and a big reason for that is the rise of online video (thank you, Netflix!).
If you hate the idea of data caps, then you should welcome stuff like Stadia that drastically drives up data usage by average joes. Caps don't get raised/eliminated due to usage by a few outlier power users, they get raised when the more typical user's consumption goes up.
IBM bought RedHat to help them compete in this space.
For 34 billion dollars. ($34,000,000,000.00)
It might be prudent to wait to see what services they roll out before you write them off.
That $34b sounds like a lot, but in this space it's not really a huge sum - Amazon has already spent far more on AWS and is literally a decade ahead. Heck, $34b is not drastically more than what AWS *made* in 2018 revenue, and every indication is that it will far surpass that in 2019 (see e.g. https://www.statista.com/stati...).
IBM's purchase of RedHat just supports this point - they are far behind and haven't really done any significant innovation in this space, so the RedHat purchase could be seen as trying to buy their way out of being just a small niche player (https://www.geekwire.com/2018/state-cloud-amazon-web-services-bigger-four-major-competitors-combined/). To me it looks more like them moving away from a general cloud compute offering.
Like I said, their and Oracle's offerings will probably always exist in some form, but at this stage there's little or no evidence that they'll ever threaten the top dogs in the general cloud space that the article is talking about. They can probably carve out a nice spot somewhere, providing less general services or something (and doubling down on a specific Linux distro speaks to a narrowing focus, not a broadening one) and probably make some good money as a niche player.
AWS, yes. IBM and Oracle, no. Sure, they may always exist, but they will likely never be large enough to be relevant. Neither has shown any sort of innovation in that space and are just me-too'ing it. And for Oracle it's doubly bad because they have such a terrible reputation. MSFT is far bigger and entrenched than IBM or Oracle.
In comparing the various sizes of these providers, it's easy to forget how relatively small some of them are to AWS. A couple of years ago, AWS was bigger than its next 14 competitors *combined*. A lot have grown since then, but even just a year ago it was still bigger than the next 4 combined:
To me the comic sounds dumb and offensive and likely to lose money, but it's far better to let the market prove this out than to preemptively censor them via an outrage posse.
But yes, you are outdated. I don't mean that in an offensive way at all, but your views on things such as "scripts" vs "real programs" are many, many years out of date (and objectively wrong). Technology has advanced, tools have improved, the state of the art has matured.
There's more opportunity than any of us can get to, so we each have to find a niche to play in, and if you've found yours, then more power to you. But I can't help but wonder if you might not have as good an understanding of the state of things as you think..
(this is coming from someone who once was "sure" that I'd never make the jump to C because there was just no way I was going to give up the performance and control of assembly)
For example: in many of the shots of e.g. a TIE fighter flying through space, you can see a very obvious color mismatch between the background and the area around the tie fighter - not just the lighting on the fighter, but the space around the fighter has a different shade. I don't know if it was just the green screen or whatever technology was more immature back then, but you can see a rectangle-ish area around the ship that moves with it through space.
For its time, it was amazing still. These days, it looks shoddy (and out of all the silly changes they made in the re-releases, this was a legitimate problem that was fixed and looks better as a result).
To each his own I guess, but when was the last time you looked at the unedited, unretouched originals?
The work is impressive for its time, and some things still look great, but there's also quite a bit that now looks kinda shoddy by today's standards (like when you can see the matting around ships in space or when a creature looks little better than a mid-range Halloween costume).
Very much this. Out of all of the newer SW films, I've liked Solo and Rogue One the best.
The problem is that Last Jedi sucked - it was a mess of a movie that insulted fans ("hey, here's an opportunity to end the Leia character in a reasonable way, an especially good idea now that the actress for that character is dead. Ooh, instead, let's throw in some quasi-divine intervention and then have her fly back, Mary Poppins style! Yeah!!"), and so IMO was on the receiving end of a lot of blowback from that. Had Solo come out before TLJ, it probably would have done really well.
Does this material actually exist and has it been tested? HELL NO
Hehe, in the time it took you to write your little rant, you could have clicked the link to the article and seen the nifty video showing the material being used.
That's the intent at least, but it's nearly impossible to capture just that in a right-to-be-forgotten law, so the result ends up being a law that has all sorts of goofy implications and creates a mess. If you're a public performer and don't like a review someone did of your show, just claim that the review is personal data and demand the review be removed (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/31/pianist-asks-the-washington-post-to-remove-a-concert-review-under-the-e-u-s-right-to-be-forgotten-ruling/).
The EU's GDPR proposal used the definition of "any information concerning an identified or identifiable person" (see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/lega...), which is broad enough to cover just about anything. What matters is more than just the bits of information, but the context and the intent.
There exist many copies of a high school yearbook with a picture of me that I really don't like. That's personal data, right? So do I have some right to demand that those yearbooks be destroyed? What if someone posts online a picture from that same page and inadvertently don't crop out the part that includes my picture. Do I have a right to demand it be taken down?
If my picture was in the local newspaper 20 years ago, do I have a right to demand that they go back and remove it from their archives? What if I wrote a scathing letter to the editor and then after they published it, I regretted my decision. Do I have a right to demand they remove that from their website and all record of it?
In all of these cases, the answer is 'no', and yet these are exactly the kinds of scenarios that get created by right-to-be-forgotten laws. You can say that the purpose of the law is simply "to stop any old Tom, Dick, or Harry broadcasting your personal data for ever and a day" but translating that into the text of a good law is really hard (or impossible).
You seem to be looking at things in black and white
Hehe, no, I simply disagree with you.
Look, every human being deals with the faults of others. Every single human relationship involves looking past weaknesses, forgiving, and moving beyond mistakes. Getting good at that - getting good at realizing everyone else is full of faults just like you, and getting good at not getting hung up on someone else's mistakes (especially when they've shown a desire to change and overcome that fault) is an essential part of growing up and being a member of society.
Trying to rewrite history by erasing the parts you don't like is (a) futile, (b) counterproductive (because it diminishes the natural lessons we all need to learn from screwing up), and (c) empowering to those who would use your past against you.
It's pitiful when someone is small-minded, tries to hide their past, only to have someone else dig it up and bring it to light. OTOH, when someone owns up to their mistakes and shows they've learned and grown into a new person because of it, it completely disarms anyone who tries to use their past as a weapon (it's also really inspiring).
Slashdot Mirror
I've found that python isn't bad at all for smaller jobs, but larger ones, particularly resident ones, very often become problematic and need to be restarted, as they get slower and slower (memory fragmentation?)
I also know I'm not alone in noticing this. Pick any large python project, go to its bugs list. You'll find it there.
I'm not arguing that Python is not without its utility. I'm simply saying that it has been used in places where it shouldn't have been. In places where someone failed when they did the cost benefit analysis. Or- as an alternative hypothesis, we have simply decided that producing code is more important than how well the code runs. Perhaps we have just entered an era where quantity is more important than quality.
I hear ya, and I know we're just swapping anecdotes, but I've run into the opposite - one area where it has really shined for us is in the really big projects. These were projects that probably wouldn't have ever made it out in the door in a lower level language but Python helped us keep the complexity manageable, which in turn made ongoing maintenance manageable. One large project in particular is nearing the decade mark since it's first release and it has really aged well - it's been solidly plugging along all that time and we've been able to expand the feature set significantly throughout that time. Obviously Python isn't the only factor here, but it's been a huge positive factor.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion, have a great day!
Sure, it works. I've just found that where it works, you simply accept the tradeoffs.
Of course, but that's true of all languages. As an example: a good chunk of my career has been writing application servers, and years ago I stopped writing them in C/C++ because the development time was too long - with C I could squeeze out nearly every ounce of potential performance, but the cost of doing so was too high (time to dev as well as the resulting complexity). The Python versions were of course slower, but not drastically so (because the servers tended to be I/O bound anyway).
When performance is the main problem, it's often easy to move a small portion of an app to a language closer to the metal, without having to port the whole thing. Last month I finished up a desktop app that takes 3D room models and generates CAD files. I wrote the app in Python but found the performance was not up to snuff (no surprise), so I moved the heavy lifting (maybe 2-3% of the functionality) to C. Performance still wasn't where I wanted it, so I moved that to the GPU.
In terms of tradeoffs, I used Python to get the whole app working end-to-end much more quickly than I would have in some other languages (especially with the requirements changing out from under me a couple of times along the way), and then moved the little kernel of performance-critical stuff into something more suitable - paying the price for tradeoffs but doing it in a way where the cost-benefit ratio worked out pretty well.
I mean, I use Zenoss. It's an amazing product. The fact that it takes 5 minutes to start up on $4000 hardware, where Nagios does it in about 12 seconds is fine. We accept the trade-off.
Out of curiosity, is there any indication that the difference is actually due to Python?
Some amount of that could be just the sucky nature to lots of large software projects - we've probably all seen big projects go bad in any number of different languages.
Like I said to the other guy, if it's not for you, great. But there's really nothing in the language that makes it inherently bad for large projects (and lots of things that makes it good for them). We've used Python on a number of very large projects and it worked out well for us.
Language choice is fairly subjective, so if you don't like Python, that's cool. But there are a number of solid reasons why it has grown in popularity and it's not because it's something new - the language is almost 30 years old now. I've been using it for about 20 years now and for me it has been terrific for one-off utility scripts written by one person to huge projects with many developers at a couple of different Fortune 50 companies, and everything in between.
Many of the alleged reasons why Python would be unusable for certain scenarios (e.g. large projects) tend to be fallacies or more theoretical problems than actual problems.
The choice of programming language *always* involves tradeoffs. Python isn't the best tool for every job, but in many scenarios the benefits have outweighed the costs in a pretty lopsided manner. To each his own of course.
What's ironic about it, exactly? Monopolies aren't inherently illegal, so the line you quoted seems accurate.
This is like a guy relocating his store to the middle of the ocean to reduce theft.
Guess Steve's not /quite/ as anti-streaming as he let on, if the price is right?
(yeah, I know, it was about feature films, but still)
My cell and home ISP data caps are much higher than they were just a few years ago, and a big reason for that is the rise of online video (thank you, Netflix!).
If you hate the idea of data caps, then you should welcome stuff like Stadia that drastically drives up data usage by average joes. Caps don't get raised/eliminated due to usage by a few outlier power users, they get raised when the more typical user's consumption goes up.
IBM bought RedHat to help them compete in this space.
For 34 billion dollars. ($34,000,000,000.00)
It might be prudent to wait to see what services they roll out before you write them off.
That $34b sounds like a lot, but in this space it's not really a huge sum - Amazon has already spent far more on AWS and is literally a decade ahead. Heck, $34b is not drastically more than what AWS *made* in 2018 revenue, and every indication is that it will far surpass that in 2019 (see e.g. https://www.statista.com/stati...).
IBM's purchase of RedHat just supports this point - they are far behind and haven't really done any significant innovation in this space, so the RedHat purchase could be seen as trying to buy their way out of being just a small niche player (https://www.geekwire.com/2018/state-cloud-amazon-web-services-bigger-four-major-competitors-combined/). To me it looks more like them moving away from a general cloud compute offering.
Like I said, their and Oracle's offerings will probably always exist in some form, but at this stage there's little or no evidence that they'll ever threaten the top dogs in the general cloud space that the article is talking about. They can probably carve out a nice spot somewhere, providing less general services or something (and doubling down on a specific Linux distro speaks to a narrowing focus, not a broadening one) and probably make some good money as a niche player.
AWS, yes. IBM and Oracle, no. Sure, they may always exist, but they will likely never be large enough to be relevant. Neither has shown any sort of innovation in that space and are just me-too'ing it. And for Oracle it's doubly bad because they have such a terrible reputation. MSFT is far bigger and entrenched than IBM or Oracle.
In comparing the various sizes of these providers, it's easy to forget how relatively small some of them are to AWS. A couple of years ago, AWS was bigger than its next 14 competitors *combined*. A lot have grown since then, but even just a year ago it was still bigger than the next 4 combined:
https://www.parkmycloud.com/bl...
Oracle doesn't even show up on that list.
Call me when this ranks in the top 500 ways we waste energy or hurt the environment.
Ah, thank you.
I'm sad to see they buckled to a petition.
To me the comic sounds dumb and offensive and likely to lose money, but it's far better to let the market prove this out than to preemptively censor them via an outrage posse.
Well, it's not average, but maybe close enough? 44% of the people pay $0.00 in federal income taxes:
https://www.marketwatch.com/st...
Electronics? No, totally unethical. For shame! Now excuse my while I go play with my totally legit Lego.
https://legoways.com/wp-conten...
Hey, if it's working for you, that's great.
But yes, you are outdated. I don't mean that in an offensive way at all, but your views on things such as "scripts" vs "real programs" are many, many years out of date (and objectively wrong). Technology has advanced, tools have improved, the state of the art has matured.
There's more opportunity than any of us can get to, so we each have to find a niche to play in, and if you've found yours, then more power to you. But I can't help but wonder if you might not have as good an understanding of the state of things as you think..
(this is coming from someone who once was "sure" that I'd never make the jump to C because there was just no way I was going to give up the performance and control of assembly)
About a year ago actually.
For example: in many of the shots of e.g. a TIE fighter flying through space, you can see a very obvious color mismatch between the background and the area around the tie fighter - not just the lighting on the fighter, but the space around the fighter has a different shade. I don't know if it was just the green screen or whatever technology was more immature back then, but you can see a rectangle-ish area around the ship that moves with it through space.
For its time, it was amazing still. These days, it looks shoddy (and out of all the silly changes they made in the re-releases, this was a legitimate problem that was fixed and looks better as a result).
I don't disagree; I was simply replying to the comment "The special effects of the original SW movies are vastly superior to current special effects".
To each his own I guess, but when was the last time you looked at the unedited, unretouched originals?
The work is impressive for its time, and some things still look great, but there's also quite a bit that now looks kinda shoddy by today's standards (like when you can see the matting around ships in space or when a creature looks little better than a mid-range Halloween costume).
Very much this. Out of all of the newer SW films, I've liked Solo and Rogue One the best.
The problem is that Last Jedi sucked - it was a mess of a movie that insulted fans ("hey, here's an opportunity to end the Leia character in a reasonable way, an especially good idea now that the actress for that character is dead. Ooh, instead, let's throw in some quasi-divine intervention and then have her fly back, Mary Poppins style! Yeah!!"), and so IMO was on the receiving end of a lot of blowback from that. Had Solo come out before TLJ, it probably would have done really well.
Does this material actually exist and has it been tested? HELL NO
Hehe, in the time it took you to write your little rant, you could have clicked the link to the article and seen the nifty video showing the material being used.
A real "pro" is also always conscious of costs vs benefits in how and where they spend their time.
That's what we did - YouTube TV has been great. A nice bonus is that each family member (up to 6 IIRC) gets their own separate archive/DVR.
That's the intent at least, but it's nearly impossible to capture just that in a right-to-be-forgotten law, so the result ends up being a law that has all sorts of goofy implications and creates a mess. If you're a public performer and don't like a review someone did of your show, just claim that the review is personal data and demand the review be removed (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/31/pianist-asks-the-washington-post-to-remove-a-concert-review-under-the-e-u-s-right-to-be-forgotten-ruling/).
The EU's GDPR proposal used the definition of "any information concerning an identified or identifiable person" (see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/lega...), which is broad enough to cover just about anything. What matters is more than just the bits of information, but the context and the intent.
There exist many copies of a high school yearbook with a picture of me that I really don't like. That's personal data, right? So do I have some right to demand that those yearbooks be destroyed? What if someone posts online a picture from that same page and inadvertently don't crop out the part that includes my picture. Do I have a right to demand it be taken down?
If my picture was in the local newspaper 20 years ago, do I have a right to demand that they go back and remove it from their archives? What if I wrote a scathing letter to the editor and then after they published it, I regretted my decision. Do I have a right to demand they remove that from their website and all record of it?
In all of these cases, the answer is 'no', and yet these are exactly the kinds of scenarios that get created by right-to-be-forgotten laws. You can say that the purpose of the law is simply "to stop any old Tom, Dick, or Harry broadcasting your personal data for ever and a day" but translating that into the text of a good law is really hard (or impossible).
You seem to be looking at things in black and white
Hehe, no, I simply disagree with you.
Look, every human being deals with the faults of others. Every single human relationship involves looking past weaknesses, forgiving, and moving beyond mistakes. Getting good at that - getting good at realizing everyone else is full of faults just like you, and getting good at not getting hung up on someone else's mistakes (especially when they've shown a desire to change and overcome that fault) is an essential part of growing up and being a member of society.
Trying to rewrite history by erasing the parts you don't like is (a) futile, (b) counterproductive (because it diminishes the natural lessons we all need to learn from screwing up), and (c) empowering to those who would use your past against you.
It's pitiful when someone is small-minded, tries to hide their past, only to have someone else dig it up and bring it to light. OTOH, when someone owns up to their mistakes and shows they've learned and grown into a new person because of it, it completely disarms anyone who tries to use their past as a weapon (it's also really inspiring).