I’ve been doing a lot of python programming this last year {allurstuff, deseb, flyback, ogmaps}, and several people have asked me variations on the following:

Thought of you when I read this
http://www.xkcd.com/353/
So is python really all that??

Well the answer is: Good god no. While python’s the best “everything is a hash table” language I’ve used, it shares the same problems all such languages have: very little compile time checking of object types. Your function is expecting a list, but someone passes in a string? Opps! And it doesn’t even fail-fast – you iterate over every char in the string. Which means many possible runtime errors, which are infinitely harder to test for and debug. Plus python STILL doesn’t have multi-processor support, even though it has its own reasonably nice threading model.

But it is great for banging out stuff quickly. And the glade/GTK bindings are pretty sweet.

So I’m proposing “Derek’s PvJ Rule”:

For every minute saved typing “my_list = []” instead of “List<String> myList = new ArrayList<String>();“, one hour of debugging is lost, one customer is pissed off, and god kills a kitten.

=P

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 5:59 pm and is filed under funny, programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.