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Programming Languages
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Someone tried to learn python and failed.
He mixed up spaces and tabs, threw the keyboard out the window.
Python is nice.
Well, to be fair, Matz (the Ruby creator) called Python a toy language.
Yeah, in 1993.
That's correct. I don't think anyone would seriously call Python that today.
One of us has spent the last three months trying to help their client untangle their massive python monolith that makes all their in house engineers quit.
Python is a good language for writing a data processing script, not for building a large piece of software.
It sounds like the issue was devs creating a crappy monolith, not the language itself.
Python is an overall robust language that allows you to do basically whatever you want, and does it pretty well. You can even use C extensions if you want to get peak performance.
The two domains that I believe Python cannot easily work with, are IoT where the interpreter would be a bit too cumbersome for a low-power system, and web programming, where it would still underperform Javascript and Webassembly (even though I am guessing that with a better webassembly support of the browsers, it would be possible to reach a rather efficient interpreter in-browser that would at least reach performances similar to javascript, if not better. And even if slower, the better syntax and lack of absurd rules would be a clear advantage on JavaScript).
Considering V8 overcame python in benchmarks nearly a decade ago, I'm not sure even some miraculous webassembly environment would put python faster than javascript in the browser of all places.
V8 does not quite compete with the big guns in the space (C, Rust, Go), but now that it's only 2-4x slower than C++, it's created this niche of "almost hardcore fast" for javascript that is just unlikely to be dethroned any time soon.
People fail to quite get how many leaps and bounds V8 has taken in the last 10-12 years. Javascript's reputation of being "scripting language slow" is simply no longer the case and hasn't been for an entire Era in software terms. Reasonably-written Javascript is now often faster than heavily-tuned Python, and well-written javascript is faster than reasonably-written C++. It's not necessarily fair (like comparing modern solar to nuclear, with the absurd amount of money that's gone into solar research), but I don't see it changing any time soon.
Defending javascript syntax is not really a valid thing. Even js devs admit it.
Is it perfect? No. Is it inherently better than a language that mistakenly thinks that whitespace is more readable than braces? Yes.
White space delimiting is awful and near impossible to scan in yaml config files, let alone a real programming language.