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Comment by pansa2

5 years ago

Fantastic talk, covering the difference between “simple” and “easy”, and how (when you can’t have both) the former is preferable.

I find it interesting that Python, despite being widely described as a simple language, takes the opposite approach. The language isn’t simple at all [0], it prefers to make things easy. This preference even appears (in the contrapositive) in the “Zen of Python”: “Complex is better than complicated.”

As a specific example, Python 3.7 introduced dataclasses, making them dependent on type hints when they could have been completely orthogonal. The language design ignored this talk’s advice against “complecting” features.

[0] https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/1280946969116995584

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pansa2

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iLemming  5 years ago

https://twitter.com/lxsameer/status/1273546170137300992

> I wrote a #clojure program for logic A in 4 hours. I've been asked to rewrite it in #python because of some product requirements. It's been 3 days since i've started and still on the first 25% of it. Note: I'm using python for more than 13 years.

  • Scarbutt  5 years ago

    Yeah, no way that's true if his python and clojure knowledge are at the same level. That tweet sounds like what you see on r/clojure all the time, a cult.

    • iLemming  5 years ago

      After using a bunch of other programming languages professionally (for over fifteen years), I can confirm - Clojure is a cult. I am so stuck in it and have no desire to leave. Rich Hickey is a voodoo shaman or something. Don't you ever watch his talks and do not try Clojure! I have warned you!

    • lgessler  5 years ago

      It seems hard to say conclusively what is or isn't possible about differences in development time without knowing more about the problem domain. Since he mentions GIL in one of his tweets, it seems like his code must have involved concurrency, and Python and Clojure differ enough in this regard (to say the least...) that it seems believable that something that's easy in Clojure could be gut-wrenching in Python.

    • iLemming  5 years ago

      > That tweet sounds like what you see on r/clojure all the time, a cult.

      Check any Clojure forum - clojureverse, clojurians slack, mailing-list. Talks from conferences. Clojure/conj , ClojureD, ClojureX, etc. Click around, check the profiles. Then you'd probably see that majority of Clojure users are not that young. Most of them come to Clojure after learning other, very often multiple programming languages. Many of them have tried all sorts of different tools before finally discovering Clojure.

      You see it over and over again, people claiming that Python, and other popular PLs have little to offer in comparison to Clojure ecosystem. And your only explanation is "it's a cult"? Yeah, sure. Clojurists are just a bunch of losers who simply failed to learn Python. It is a pretty cool cult to be in, it is based on ideas endorsed by people like Guy Steele, Gerald Jay Sussman, Paul Graham, Matthias Felleisen, Brian Goetz, and many others.