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What I Don't Like About Python 41

Posted by tottinger Wed, 18 Jul 2007 02:41:00 GMT

I love python.

I love the simplicity, the nice data types, the strong dynamic typing, the significant indentation, the runtime flexibility, the list comps, the generators, they way that I can get work done in Python. I love the built-in help. I dig the Tao of Python.

There are still a few bits that seem artificial and clumsy. I was told that you don’t really know a language if there are not five things you hate about it. I have more than five, but these will do for now:

    • Dir is not a very good name for the method that dumps the contents of an object. I don’t like the ruby alternative, where methods and members are separate, but I just don’t like the naming here. A change would be possible. It would have to be grandfathered in, but it could happen.
    • double-underscores annoy me. I would like to see some other way of denoting operators and other magic functions. I suppose one could grandfather-in a decorator-based trick for defining operators. It would be a real compatibility breaker, but I really feel that __getitem__ is probably not the best naming our guys could come up with.
    • __name__ has always felt like a hack to me. Try explaining it to a novice programmer, or worse to someone who programs in perl or ruby or java for a living. Comparing the magic variable __name__ to the magic constant ”__main__” feels doubly so. I would rather have a convention such as naming a method “main” or maybe decorating with @script_main now that we have decorators.
    • Blocks give me of ruby envy or smalltalk envy. I like local functions. Love them. I tolerate lambda. But I really, really would like to see a more rubyesque iterator setup where we pass a callable to the list, and the callable can be defined free-form inline. Python doesn’t really do that and so it’s less of a language lab than I might like.
    • Properties are unattractive, partly because of blocks being absent. I don’t really want to define a named parameter (with double-underscores, most likely) and then two named functions, and THEN declare a property. That seems like so much work for such a simple situation. It is something I will only do if all other methods fail me, or if all other methods are overriding __setattr__ and __getattr__.
    • Lack of recognition just kills me. This is a wonderful little language with great libraries and tremendous capability. Google, Eve, Nasa, a great many scientific efforts, a bunch of web sites, and a lot of Linux installers and configuration tools use python. A number of very nice distributed version control tools are written in it. But still people seem to go deaf if anyone mentions python, as if we’d mentioned JCL or something. I don’t get that.
    • There is a very ugly mutual-inclusion design bug bug. I spent time on it once and was very unhappy.
    • Self loathing takes over in my functions. I wish that I could refer to member variables without saying “self.” first. Testing would be easier if I could just import all my fixture variables into my local namespace—or better if it were done for me automagically. Typing “self.” doesn’t kill me, but it doesn’t help me. Yes, I have an abbreviation in my editor, but it still bugs me.

Don’t put me down as a complainer. I really, really love working in python. But There’s a lot more love than hate here.

PS: Is it uncommonly sensible that “not” is spelled “not”, “and” is spelled “and” and “or” is spelled “or”? I think so. && I’m ! just kidding || something.

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  1. Avatar
    ewiethoff about 1 month later: 
    >>> members = dir
>>> members()
['__builtins__', '__doc__', '__name__', 'members', 
'sys']
>>> members(str)
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', 
'__delattr__', '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', 
'__getitem__', '__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', 
'__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', 
'__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__repr__', 
'__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'capitalize', 
'center', 'count', 'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 
'expandtabs', 'find', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 
'isdigit', 'islower', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 
'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'replace', 'rfind', 
'rindex', 'rjust', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 
'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 
'upper']
  2. Avatar
    Mike 2 months later:

    Python doesn’t lack recognition I think. As a Ruby guy I have to say that Python is way more widespread at the moment. And it is good for Python :-)

  3. Avatar
    hoffmann@cs.umass.edu 2 months later:

    self-loathing.

    Hmmm, I always just used ’s’ instead of ‘self’. For accessing fields it’s only one more character to type “s.field” than such typical C++/Java conventions as “aField” or “field_”. And starting every method declaration with “(s,” becomes second-nature.

  4. Avatar
    Matt 2 months later:

    Yeah, most of these tick me off. I don’t think Python 3000 is really going to address any of these, either.

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    bag manufacturer over 3 years later:

    ility, the list comps, the generators, they way that I can get work done in Pyt

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    My main disappointment with Python is that it is a dynamic language where types are objects and runtime instantiable but I’ve yet to see any guide to how this feature can be really utilized. The object system’s internal behavior is relatively poorly explained; e.g. if you look hard enough you’ll find that the rules for attribute lookup depend on data descriptors vs. non-data descriptors but not, say, why the rules depend on this or how this dependency can or should be used. Letting your code construct classes for you is pretty powerful.

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    A number of very nice distributed version control tools are written in it. But still people seem to go deaf if anyone mentions python, as if we’d mentioned JCL or something. I don’t get that.

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    Testing would be easier if I could just import all my fixture variables into my local namespace—or better if it were done for me automagically.

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