Python has a library for everything but..
Python has a library for everything but..
37 comments
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I love shitting on Python, but I feel like all those problems are present in libraries for other languages as well. There's a tonne of that crap for JS/TS.
Similarly, I find a fair number of Rust crates (that I want to use) have virtually no doc or inline examples, and use weird metaprogramming that I can't wrap my head around.
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Are we living in a world in which the JS/TS ecosystem is the yardstick by which we measure well written code? I mean... Wait a minute! I figured it out! This is the Bad Place!
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What took you so long?
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Every time I have a problem, I throw a regex on it, and BOOOOM, right away I have a different problem
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I mean, if we're talking about all those problems, the no-type-annotations issue is rather specific for Python, JS/TS and Ruby.
But in general, I feel like there's somewhat of an old world vs. new world divide, which happened when package registries started accepting libraries from everyone and their cat.
In C, for example, most libraries you'll use will be quite well-documented, but you'll also never hear of the library that Greg's cat started writing for the niche thing that you're trying to do.
Unfortunately, Greg's cat got distracted by a ball of yarn rolling by and then that was more fun than writing documentation.
That's the tradeoff, you get access to more libraries, but you just can't expect all of them to be extremely high-quality... -
You should look at some old Perl or C code. I have even seen some shell code that makes me want to bash my head in till death with an IBM Model M Keyboard
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That's why they named the shell like that
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I feel like there's a very fine balance for the effort required to publish a package.
Too easy and you get npm.
Too hard and you get an empty repo.
I feel like Java is actually doing a relatively good job here. Most packages are at least documented a bit, though obviously many are outdated.
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Uh, there are an absolute fuckload of Java libs out there with nothing more than auto-generated garbage Javadocs.
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Lol also the importing of lpad and iseven
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bonus points if you're using a statically typed language but the library uses extensive metaprogramming seemingly for the sole purpose of hiding what types you actually need
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This is probably my biggest complaint about trying to learn Python past the beginner level and into intermediate and beyond. This is also one of my strongest arguments in favor of static type systems over dynamic ones.
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Rust crates have the second and third problems.
Rust at least has type annotation.
The type has private fields. There's no constructor. There's no implementation of the From trait except on itself. You can't find a function anywhere that returns the type.
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I find Rust crates generally have pretty good docs. Docs.rs is a major time saver
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Using cryptic parameter names is just nonsense when you can obviously use lewd cryptic parameter names instead.
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you should learn Rust. the type system is so comprehensive that half the time you can guess what a function does (or at the very least what you're supposed to pass to it) without a single line of human written documentation.
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My problem with Rust is that I find refactoring really painful.
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also how they are used as backdoors nowadays
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And now we have free threads so I can't say at least you don't have normal concurrency problems 🤣
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I really like Python. The only thing I don't want to do with Python is support a large code base. Lack of strict typing makes refactoring awful
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I'm just glad I have other options than just Python. Am not afraid of writing my solutions either. I rarely use Python these day.
37 comments