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by jact 142 days ago
Are Python apps really so easy to understand? I seriously disagree with this idea given how much magic goes behind nearly every line of Python. Especially if you veer off the happy path.

I certainly am no fan of C but from a certain point of view it’s much easier to understand what’s going on in C.
2 comments
fwip 142 days ago
Well-written Python apps are very easy to understand, especially if they use well-designed libraries.

The 'magic' in Python means that skilled developers can write libraries that work at the appropriate level of abstraction, so they are a joy to use.

Conversely, it also means that a junior dev, or an LLM pretending to be a junior dev, can write insane things that are nearly impossible to use correctly.

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tasuki 141 days ago
> Well-written Python apps are very easy to understand, especially if they use well-designed libraries.

Oh. Why haven't I seen those?

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fwip 141 days ago
Dunno dude, maybe you haven't looked. Maybe you hate Python. Maybe you're stupid. Anything could be possible.
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awesome_dude 142 days ago
One of the (many) reasons that I moved away from Python was the whole "we can do it in 3 lines"

Oh cool someone has imported a library that does a shedload of really complicated magic that nobody in the shop understands - that's going to go well.

We're (The Software Engineering community as a whole) are also seeing something similar to this with AI generated code, there's screeds of code going into a codebase that nobody understands is full across (give a reviewer a 5 line PR and they will find 14 things to change, give them a 500 line PR and LGTM is all you will see).

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