From late-bound arguments to deferred computation, part 2

Posted Aug 25, 2022 3:32 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413)
In reply to: From late-bound arguments to deferred computation, part 2 by milesrout
Parent article: From late-bound arguments to deferred computation, part 2

Python used to be simple, and pretty good at maintaining comprehensibility. That's gone in practice and gone culturally.

From late-bound arguments to deferred computation, part 2

Posted Aug 25, 2022 6:57 UTC (Thu) by pwfxq (subscriber, #84695) [Link] (3 responses)

I think that could be said about many languages. They start simple and slowly add features until they become a Gordian Knot. We must be due a new language soon...

From late-bound arguments to deferred computation, part 2

Posted Aug 25, 2022 10:27 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, certainly it's the overall trend, but python navigated like its first 10 years or so in a pretty healthy manner, which is relatively unusual.

From late-bound arguments to deferred computation, part 2

Posted Aug 26, 2022 20:52 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

Eh, Python spent its first 10 years or so building out descriptors and modern classes (remember "classic" classes?), which were rather substantial overhauls of the language's syntax and semantics (especially when you consider metaclasses in their full generality). But nobody cared, because these things were relatively abstruse and could be quietly ignored if you just wanted to write a 10-line script, and if you were writing a larger program, the old way of doing things was obviously inferior in a number of ways.

From late-bound arguments to deferred computation, part 2

Posted Aug 28, 2022 0:47 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Yes, I remember this fully. While there were significant changes going on, the surface area to the usual programmer changed extremely little, and pretty much all my deployed python from 1.4 and 1.5 continued blissfully on without trouble. Some complexity existed in that engineering work, but it wasn't pushed onto most users.

That old way of doing things, just making a language that worked, is pretty superior.

From late-bound arguments to deferred computation, part 2

Posted Aug 26, 2022 23:10 UTC (Fri) by rjones (subscriber, #159862) [Link]

As a guy who used python extensively as a sort of utility language to "do things"...

I am very happy Golang exists.

From late-bound arguments to deferred computation, part 2

Posted Aug 28, 2022 19:50 UTC (Sun) by tnoo (subscriber, #20427) [Link]

Exactly my feelings. The language becomes overloaded with stuff that is hard to understand, and worse, unintuitive.