It's great for beginners. Then it turns into a mess.
- A huge ecosystem of good third-party libraries.
- Named arguments.
- Multiple inheritance.
- It's easy to learn and read. However, it's only easy to learn and read at the start. Once you get past "Hello world" Python can get really ugly and counterintuitive.
- The Pythonic philosophy that "There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it." As someone who loves working within rules and rigid frameworks, I love this philosophy! As someone who writes Python, I really wish Python actually stuck to this philosophy. See below.
- Forced indentation. Some love it because it enforces consistency and a degree of readability. Some hate it because they think it enforces the wrong consistency. To each their own.
- Dynamic typing. There are lots of dynamically-typed languages and lots of statically-typed languages. Which kind of typing is better isn't a Python debate, it's a general programming debate.
-
400 ways (more or less) to interpolate strings. This prints "Hello Robin!" 3 times:
user = {'name': "Robin"} print(f"Hello {user['name']}!") print("Hello {name}!".format(**user)) print("Hello %(name)s!" % user)
If there was a unique and obvious use-case for each of these then that would be one thing, but there's not.
-
69 top-level functions that you have to just memorize. GvR's explanation sounds nice, but in reality it makes things confusing.
-
map
doesn't return a list, even though the whole point of a mapping function is to create one list from another. Instead it returns amap
object, which is pretty much useless since it's missingappend
,reverse
, etc. So, you always have to wrap it inlist()
, or use a list comprehension, which, speaking of... -
List comprehensions are held up as an excellent recent-ish addition to Python. People say they're readable. That's true for simple examples (e.g.
[x**2 for x in range(10)]
) but horribly untrue for slightly more complex examples (e.g.[[row[i] for row in matrix] for i in range(4)]
). I chalk this up to... -
Weird ordering in ternary/one-line expressions. Most languages follow a consistent order where first you declare conditions, then you do stuff based the on those conditions:
if user.isSignedIn then user.greet else error
for user in signedInUsers do user.greet
Python does this in the opposite order:
user.greet if user.isSignedIn else error
[user.greet for user in signedInUsers]
This is fine for simple examples. It's bad for more complex logic because you have to first find the middle of the expression before you can really understand what you're reading.
-
Syntax for tuples. If you write a single-item tuple
(tuple,)
but forget the trailing comma, it's no longer a tuple but an expression. This is a really easy mistake to make. Considering the only difference between tuples and lists is mutability, it would make much more sense to use the same syntax[syntax]
as lists, which does not require a trailing comma, and add afreeze
orimmutable
method. Speaking of... -
There's no way to make
dict
s or complex objects immutable. -
Regular expressions require a lot of boilerplate:
re.compile(r"regex", re.I | re.M)
Compared to JavaScript or Ruby:
/regex/ig
-
The goofy string literal syntaxes:
f''
,u''
,b''
,r''
. -
The many "magic" __double-underscore__ attributes that you just have to memorize.
-
You can't reliably catch all errors and their messages in one statement. Instead you have to use something like
sys.exc_info()[0]
. You shouldn't have a catch-all in production of course, but in development it's very useful, so this unintuitive extra step is annoying.
Most programmers will acknowledge criticisms of their favorite language. Instead, Pythonists will say, "You just don't understand Python."
Most programmers will say a piece of code is bad if it's inefficient or hard to read. Pythonists will say a piece of code is bad if "it isn't Pythonic enough." This is about as helpful as someone saying your taste in music is bad because "it isn't cultured enough."
Pythonists have a bit of a superiority complex.
Because if you always copy everything, you never innovate. We'd be stuck with punch cards if no-one ever innovated.
Also, Python has an aversion to cryptic symbols, so they had to use text instead of "?" and ":" (Not necessarily cryptic code; I am aware that people have problems with comprehensions.)
If you start writing versions with words instead of symbols, I think you'll find that
a if a > b else b
falls out quite naturally. IIRC there were also some polls that found that the use for ternary operators was to set default values where it sort of makes sense to have the common result first.My point is that there were good reasons to do it that way at the time, and they couldn't know before trying if it was a good idea.
First of all, you don't do it that way. Something like
"the value is %s" % i
would be more like it. (I know, cryptic symbols. But this has ancient roots, copied from C before the dawn of time. )...yes. Obviously; that is what I want. I don't get that objection at all. If you want to print a string, you have to have a string to print. If you want to walk you have to have legs.
As an aside, using
+
for concatenation is one of the warts of Python. Addition is commutative, concatenation isn't. Silly.I like
self
, makes things explicit. There are ABC:s and types now, don't need interfaces too. Underscores as access control is brilliant, a perfect solution to the actual problem.Duck typing isn't about turning cars into ducks, it is about allowing both cars and geese to
honk
, without requiring them to be explicitly defined as honkers. You don't have to like duck typing, I don't particularly, but complaining about it because you don't know what it is... perfectly in line with this thread.Yes... would you use a female doctor? It's not about the soft bits, all that matters is if it works correctly.