Why is there so much debate between python and other programming languages??

Question

Python

[Note by David Carroll]
Eyube Daniel I'm making an exception to keep this question as the discussions have made it more relevant and addresses a question for many new to programming.

Answer 1

I prefer to give every language credit for its own strong points.

Answer 2

🌟Prometheus 🇸🇬 It's not so much about professional devs preferring speed over ease or disliking how different Python is from other languages.

As the code base gets bigger, Python becomes far more brittle, difficult to maintain, refactor, debug, extend, and unit test compared to most other languages.

This becomes increasingly more challenging with more developers working on the same code base.

Regarding the Python Package Managers, it might come as a surprise to many who have worked primarily with Python, that despite Python being created 29 years ago in 1990, pip has only existed for the past 8 years.

Despite being one of the newest package managers, it's the most problematic and inconsistent across platforms, versions, and dependencies compared to the many other package managers that just work and handle dependencies with less issues. (Actually, maven might be the worst.)

As far as the selection of 3rd party packages, the same is true for npm, rubygems, nuget, pear, composer, maven, and many others.

Answer 3

David Carroll you're so the Sololearn psychologist!

Answer 4

Eyube Daniel The debates surrounding Python are due to many opinions coming from many different contexts of understanding and experiences, emotional vs objective attachments to a language, perspectives as students vs professionals, etc.

Opinions will vary between those who know only Python, those who don't know Python but do know another language, and those who are familiar with many languages including Python.

Many people will defend python because it's what they know and others will attack python because they are more comfortable with another language.

There is also a massive amount of hype around the popularity of Python from silly reports like TIOBE Index and various surveys. I refer to this as hype because it's not aligned with the many development shops I'm familiar with or with many developers in my professional network whose objectivity I trust.

Hopefully this sheds some light on why there is so much debate around Python. 😉

BTW... I'm not following this thread. Mention me if you want a reply.

Answer 5

Well Python seems to have taken the world by storm. Those who are tightly attached to another language probably find it hard to believe or accept it and are probably trying to defend or argue for their own favourite language.

Answer 6

If I may add more to the debate, despite the greatness of Python, I believe I heard that Facebook is replacing a lot of its Python code with a more Performant one.

Answer 7

Eyube Daniel Or maybe you're reading too much from people's facial expressions rather than just engaging further in verbal communication.

Bottom line, if you love Python and it's enough to allow you to successfully deliver solutions to problems, then don't worry about the looks and the debates or opinions from people with different tech stack needs.

Once you hit a brick wall with the language and it no longer suits your needs, explore other languages.

If you're looking for validation in loving Python from a veteran professional software developer with a wide range of experience across many languages, tech stacks, platforms, etc... you'll drive yourself crazy as you might not like what you hear.

If you can't let it go, then learn a couple more languages and really dig into them to discover for yourself the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

Answer 8

Holy cow HonFu, what are you suggesting now? That we worship this God that bears the name of a serpent?

Answer 9

Every programming language has its own pros and cons and may serve well for some particular use cases , its good to know your use cases and chose language suits your need

Answer 10

David Carroll, PAFIERD! 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂

It's great how you again and again spend so much time to discuss with us although you must have enough on your plate already.

Eyube Daniel, this is what I was talking about 70 answers ago: It's hard to tell from your original post, what actually happened.

I'm glad that although you *still* didn't really tell us (never mind now), the talk has come to a higher level.

There is the side of the matter where people shallowly want to identify 'true' and 'untrue' programmers and hail the king of languages, which is basically snobism.

Then there's the other side, reasonably talking about the actual attributes of a language. And Python has its downsides, and 'leaving you crippled' may be one of them.

You just need to watch out that you remain curious for what's going on 'under the hood' and not fall into a 'don't need to know' attitude.

Then probably you will *want* to learn other languages as well, and you'll probably happily be using them side by side as warranted.

Answer 11

Eyube Daniel I can only imagine the challenge it might be for a beginner trying to learn programming concepts for the first time along with their first language and all the libraries and frameworks along the way.

From the beginner's perspective, it might feel like it will always be a struggle. However, it does eventually become easier to the point of feeling intuitive and second nature.

I think I was productive with Python after a few hours of messing around with the syntax. That's because I'm not learning to code or trying to understand the many concepts I take for granted anymore.

While learning a new language, you begin to create a mental map of what you expect compared to what you're familiar with in other languages.

Python does have differences I had to figure out. Some I love, like list compressions, most I hate.

Learning new libraries are similar. As you become familiar with the patterns and capabilites of many libraries, switching to new libraries become more intuitive.

Answer 12

You may may find some hardcore C/C++ people talk about performance and that Python is too slow etc. but the versatility of Python is in its vast libraries and some of these libraries are implemented in C which makes the performance really good. So, I think some of these arguments are not valid.

Answer 13

As someone said, you probably need to choose the best language for your task in the end but I also have a feeling that Python will dominate a lot of fields in years to come. Some areas where it won't get to number one any time soon maybe the web front-end due to JS, Android development due to Kotlin/Java, console game development due to C++/C#.

Answer 14

I also experienced that shock. ;-)

I think it's important to understand that Python simplifies a lot of things for you - which can be a good thing. Naturally there is more.

See Python as level 1 of a larger game. Be happy when you 'finish' it (you never *really* finish it), then go for level 2.

Answer 15

This thread ain't gonna die due to continued discussion. Even when the question only had 1 like (now it has about 5) it was #1 in the Hot Today section.

Answer 16

Well I've done coding in both Python and web codes a lot (check my codes).

I've gotten a head start on Python and the simplicity of its programming is just too irresistible. It's as easy as "print('Hello world')" rather than like

public class Main{
public static void main(String[] args){
System.out.println("Hello World");
}
}

Ugh, so much work just for a hello world code.

However, professional devs might not feel as optimistic about Python. It's slow. And its syntax is far too different from other mainstream programming languages like Java, JavaScript.

Personally I love Python a lot due to ease of coding as well as 3-rd party libraries that are easy to install ("just use python -m pip install library_name").

Answer 17

Lol I couldn't help that my school introduced me to Python first and by extension, I found Sololearn because of that ~ swim ~ 😂😂

But I agree with your point.

Answer 18

I agree with 𝕵𝖆𝖓 𝕸𝖆𝖗𝖐𝖚𝖘 because If you research a little bit, you will surely find that Python is declared as the best and most highly paid language!!😊

Check out link to find out more about a Python developer salary =

https://intellipaat.com/blog/python-developer-salary/

Answer 19

David Carroll it actually came to a point if you mention python to a co-programmer, they look at you with the mentality of "you're not so tough" but the way the table turned in favour of python is surprising. Its quite simpler though.

Answer 20

Eyube Daniel maybe in the last part HonFu is trying to use the analogy of the evolution of communication to demonstrate that Python is a modern language where you mostly deal with higher level constructs while acknowledging that certain low level languages/tools like C are still required to more closely control the hardware. However, I had no idea that violinists looked down on violists. I find that I am constantly learning new things on Sololearn each day.