this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
8 points (62.5% liked)

Unpopular Opinion

6295 readers
27 users here now

Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!


How voting works:

Vote the opposite of the norm.


If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.



Guidelines:

Tag your post, if possible (not required)


  • If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
  • If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].


Rules:

1. NO POLITICS


Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.


2. Be civil.


Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...


Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.


5. No trolling.


This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.



Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
8
Python is overrated and overused. (self.unpopularopinion)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by scharf_2x40 to c/unpopularopinion
 

Python is the most popular programming language and beloved by many. However I can't understand why (this is still the case in 2024).

Here are my main gripes with it:

  • It is slow, performance intensive tasks have to be offloaded to other languages, which makes it complicated to analyse. Moreover I wonder how many kwH could have been saved if programms were written in more performant languages. (and there are better alternatives out there)
  • The missing type system makes it easy to make errors, and the missing compiler makes it hard to catch them
  • It has no linear algebra built in, so you always have to convert things to numpy arrays, which is quite annoying
  • Managing virtual environments and pip packages feels overly complicated

I guess much comes down to personal, but I just can't understand the love for python.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] scharf_2x40 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I mean others don't seem to have the same problem with Python as me, so if it is right for them, I can't really complain, but I would use the following languages for the following tasks

Scientific Computing (my main area): I prefer Julia, it is faster, feels more intuitive and feels like a modern python for scientific computing

Web: there are many great frameworks out there, i am intrigued by phoenix for elixir

Game Developement: Nobody use python in games to distribute for anything heavy I hope, but for scripting I would use Lua

Learning: Python is often the first language, that people learn, and I guess that also explains it's widespread use to some degree. I would teach something less high-level like C as a first language, although I think writing "high-level code" also has a learning curve to it.

Scripting: Fine, I guess python is great for small scripts, although one could also use Ruby

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

lua imo is better for both learning and scripting, primarily due to being a very simple language