Fedora 30 Planning To Enable Python Generators By Default

[tildearrow]

Well sure, if there were zero barrier to entry that might be the case, but let's draw this into an analogy. Let's say that there's 2 restaurants in the world A and B, both of these restaurants cost the same, but B has the most delicious food you might ever taste while A is average fare, however in order to eat at B you must be able to lift an 100lb dumbbell, and demonstrate other feats of physical prowess. Who is going to have more customers? A or B?

I would ask B's manager the following: "But why do I have to do that? Does it make any sense?" (the exception would be if B was inside a gym, or something)

Furthermore, if B allows taking the food home, there is a vulnerability: I would hire somebody to lift the dumbbell (and some other stuff) and take the food outside...

[Michael_S]

The problem is, let's say every dev is capable of taking that journey, how many are actually willing to suffer the hardships to reach that end? Unless we start enforcing it at the university level, the answer is not a lot. It would be nice to believe that every dev was willing to spend the time to improve themselves and become the best they could be, but the truth is that devs are lazy and like "easy" answers even if they come back to bite them in the ass later. In Haskell's case it's quite the bar to jump over.

I haven't cleared the bar myself, so it makes sense to me.

[wizard69]

It isn’t a matter of being wrong but rather many programmers are lazy!!!!! You mention type systems but types can be a lot of work, even confusing, a two edge sword really. Then you have the cryptic nature of many languages which add complexity and discovery issues. I suspect these two issues lead to a lot of hate for C++.

Another thing you might be missing is the huge numbers of programmers that arent that aren’t that smart theory wise. This isn’t a slight but rather an observation that a good part of the Python world is people programming that are trained in other professional fields. Python is big in engineering, science and Astronomy for this very reason, that is easy for people without a computer science background. That is people that don’t know nor do they care about theory. Well computer science theory anyways.

Right. But what is fascinating is that while the non-garbage output ratio might be much better for the Haskell or Scala or Idris or similar advanced language community, the Python community total non-garbage output volume is substantially higher. There's tons more trash, but there's so much more useful stuff that for a huge selection of real world uses it makes more sense to reach for Python than the others. That outcome surprises the hell out of me.

My intuition is that the most disciplined languages with the most sophisticated type systems would have conquered every space in our industry except bleeding edge performance decades ago. And here we are, with PHP as the most popular server side language on the web and Javascript/Node and Python as wildly popular. My intuition was wrong.

[Kemosabe]

It isn’t a matter of being wrong but rather many programmers are lazy!!!!! You mention type systems but types can be a lot of work, even confusing, a two edge sword really. Then you have the cryptic nature of many languages which add complexity and discovery issues. I suspect these two issues lead to a lot of hate for C++.

Another thing you might be missing is the huge numbers of programmers that arent that aren’t that smart theory wise. This isn’t a slight but rather an observation that a good part of the Python world is people programming that are trained in other professional fields. Python is big in engineering, science and Astronomy for this very reason, that is easy for people without a computer science background. That is people that don’t know nor do they care about theory. Well computer science theory anyways.

That sounds like people with a computer science background are more proficient and produce higher quality code.
Sadly the likelihood of getting unmaintainable crap served is high - no matter where the person comes from.
Sorry for being blunt - but it's frustrating and doesn't support your theory.

[Michael_S]

That sounds like people with a computer science background are more proficient and produce higher quality code.
Sadly the likelihood of getting unmaintainable crap served is high - no matter where the person comes from.
Sorry for being blunt - but it's frustrating and doesn't support your theory.

Actually, I think that fits what he (or she, whatever) wrote. He said a lot of programmers aren't good about theory. He didn't say they make bad code, and neither did he say that people who understand and use type systems automatically make better code.

To circle back to my earlier point, this is where I think languages that support a spectrum of options might work best. So you can get things done without understanding Monads and Context Free Grammars and dependent types, but you have the option to add all of the discipline and academic rigor you want later without having to rewrite your whole project in an entirely different language.

[TLE02]

Wow. A programming language discussion that hasn't descended into flames. This is a good start for 2019.

Still. While I know that it was not the main theme here, I'm always a little sad when people, in my view, misrepresent Python language design criteria. Making Python easy to learn isn't a persistent design criteria. Focussing on readability by language design is (which as a side effect makes it easier to learn). Of course, any language can be learned to read, but not all equally well. Python is pretty close to plain English or pseudo code, which seams to be a good information density to read at...

Furthermore. The focus in readability/(functionality per line of code balance) isn't only helpful for beginners. What was that quote again? If debugging is twice as hard as programming, and I'm programming to the best of my abilities, how will I ever debug it. A focus on appropriate functionality density helps there as well.

[fuzz]

Another thing you might be missing is the huge numbers of programmers that arent that aren’t that smart theory wise. This isn’t a slight but rather an observation that a good part of the Python world is people programming that are trained in other professional fields. Python is big in engineering, science and Astronomy for this very reason, that is easy for people without a computer science background. That is people that don’t know nor do they care about theory. Well computer science theory anyways.

So true. Lots of various groups are picking up python now days and don't care at all about the software development methodologies, nor do they have the understanding or appreciation of why they are in place.

It would be interesting to see software development turn into a more rigorous field of actual engineering, but I don't see it happening any time soon. Especially since you don't even need degrees or typical education to become a good software developer.

Maybe we'll see the field move into two more distinct subsets, with professional software engineers at one end of the spectrum.

[BeardedGNUFreak]

Garbage language used by garbage tier programmers.

I've had to replace some dimwitted twenty year old's Python infrastructure code too many times over the years. It's like someone with a sick sense of humor decided it would be hilarious to bring the clusterfuck that is Javascript to scripting languages.

[nanonyme]

Ugh, that Fedora document is clearly written by someone who has trouble with the concept of UX and were just given mandatory field. Users do not read package metadata. The UX impact would literally be to have fewer broken packages. Not that I've hit broken packages on Fedora

[TLE02]

Garbage language used by garbage tier programmers

...and we're back en track...