I want to learn a new language...

[Bryan Sant]

On 2/14/07, Michael L Torrie <torriem at chem.byu.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 15:48 -0700, Andrew McNabb wrote:
> Thought I'd interject with a few of my favorite things to hate about
> python.
>
> Most of my issues with python surround the "duck" typing system.  This
> works very well for lots of things.  Basically the type of an object
> doesn't matter so long as it supports the protocol you want.  Thus you
> can use the "for x in " operation on any object that is iter-able.  The
> problem is that there's no easy way to discern ahead of time what is
> expected when you pass an object to a function.  You can use
> introspection to get the built-in docs, ask the function how many
> parameters it's expecting, true.  But if the docs don't say, you have no
> idea what methods the function is expecting to call on the object until
> you try it and get an exception.  This often makes working with
> third-party libraries very painful.  I had to run several python twisted
> networking apps in a debugger until I figured out just what the
> different methods and functions in twisted are expecting, the good docs
> notwithstanding.  The source code is essential in finding out some of
> these things.  So while I find dynamic typing extremely powerful, it
> does have warts.

Isn't this limitation true of all dynamic languages?  This isn't a
python specific problem, but the side-effect of not requiring the
declaration of parameters, their "type", and the order in which they
are expected?  Wouldn't you have the same issue you're describing with
Perl or Ruby?

> The other major architectural limitation in python is the GIL, a giant
> lock that synchronizes calls to the interpreters core.  Thus
> multithreaded programs can not utilize multiple processing units.  In
> practice this usually isn't a huge deal.  I'd say much of the time a
> multithreaded app is best done with an asynchronous library anyway, like
> twisted.  But threads have their place.  Just be aware of this
> limitation when doing heavy computations with python.

If I were doing heavy computations, I'd likely use Java.  I know
that's a cop out.  I'm not saying your concern is invalid.  But, for
*me*, if I had to do threading or heavy processing I wouldn't use a
scripting language at all.

Thanks, for the heads up though, Michael.

-Bryan