[dragonsh]

> But that's missing the point that Python is still not meant to be the best at anything, but good at most things.

The most important thing about Python is readability and its part of its syntax and is one of the best languages out there for readability.

Zen of python:

  >>> import this
  The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

  Beautiful is better than ugly.
  Explicit is better than implicit.
  Simple is better than complex.
  Complex is better than complicated.
  Flat is better than nested.
  Sparse is better than dense.
  Readability counts.
  Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
  Although practicality beats purity.
  Errors should never pass silently.
  Unless explicitly silenced.
  In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
  There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
  Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
  Now is better than never.
  Although never is often better than *right* now.
  If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
  If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
  Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
  >>>

[jen20]

I don’t know how people reconcile “python is beautiful and elegant” with “name your file __init__.py or __main__.py” while keeping a straight face.

[oblio]

Heck, the package manager having to execute random code in every package (setup.py).

And speaking of beautiful and elegant, dunders everywhere, really?

[mananaysiempre]

> Heck, the package manager having to execute random code in every package (setup.py).

Nope! Not since the mid-2010s. It took a long time, but with wheels[1], install-time actions are finally separate from packaging-time actions, and the former do not include any user-defined actions at all.

Just about every sufficiently general system allows for arbitrary code in the latter, be they in debian/rules or PKGBUILD or the buildPhase argument to mkDerivation or—indeed—in setup.py. (Most systems also try to sandbox those sooner or later, although e.g. the Arch Linux maintainers gave up on cutting off Go and Rust builds from the Internet AFAIU.)

Don’t forget to `python setup.py bdist_wheel` your stuff before you upload it!

> And speaking of beautiful and elegant, dunders everywhere, really?

It’s the one reserved namespace in the language, so its usage for __init__.py and __main__.py seems—perhaps not beautiful, but fairly reasonable?

[1] https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/binary...

[oblio]

> Just about every sufficiently general system allows for arbitrary code in the latter, be they in debian/rules or PKGBUILD or the buildPhase argument to mkDerivation or—indeed—in setup.py. (Most systems also try to sandbox those sooner or later, although e.g. the Arch Linux maintainers gave up on cutting off Go and Rust builds from the Internet AFAIU.)

Most other programming language package managers don't, see Maven for Java.

But then again, NONE of the scripting languages ever wanted to learn stuff from Java, especially regarding packaging (lack of packaging namespaces is another major blunder re-created by Python and several others, including Javascript).

[mananaysiempre]

> Most other programming language package managers don't, see Maven for Java.

So it’s not able to express native extensions or even codegen then? I suppose that’s OK for something that’s not the only available solution, but I don’t think I’d love it, either.

> But then again, NONE of the scripting languages ever wanted to learn stuff from Java, especially regarding packaging[.]

Both Java and its docs are just extremely tedious to read, to be honest. I say that with all due respect to its principal designers and acknowledging my ever-hopeless crush on Self where a lot of the tech originated. (And I don’t only mean 2000s Java—it took me literal days to trawl through the Android frame pacing library to find[1] the two lines constituting the actual predictor, commented “TODO: The exponential smoothing factor here is arbitrary”. The code of the Go standard library, nice as that is, gives me a similar feeling with how... vertical it is.)

That’s not an excuse for ignorance, but it’s a centuries-old observation that you need to avoid inflicting undue pain on your readers if you want your ideas to survive. The flip side is that there may be untapped ideas in obscure or unpleasant texts written by smart people.

So if you can point to things one could learn from Java, I’d very much be interested.

(And no, literature searches are not trivial—I’ve occasionally spent months on literature searches, sometimes to realize that the thing I wanted either isn’t in the literature or is in someone’s thesis that’s only been published a year ago.)

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/opt/gam...

[oblio]

Well, they didn't need to read much about Java in this case, frankly. Just creating a simple Java project with Maven would have showed the groupId concept (namespaces preventing top level squatting), for example.

https://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/index.html#h...

Anyway, too late now, now Python & co. are finding their own, alternative, ways to retrofit stuff like this.

[nrakx]

That applies to Python 2.7 and the code that Tim Peters writes. It does not apply to current Python and the coding styles that most people employ.

Current coding styles are either:

- Java-like ravioli, with class hierarchies that no one understands.

- Academic functional and iterator spaghetti, written by academics who think Python offers the same guarantees as Haskell.

Both styles result in severely broken code bases.

[fastasucan]

Are you really saying that these are the two coding styles of Python? Any source for this claim?

[baq]

and classes are most of the time not needed anyway, it's just Java programmers that aren't used to the idea that code can be perfectly correct and readable without a single class