From a troll-bait thread asking the argumentative question "why do people use Python"? The answers were, oddly, a long list of strange, nonsensical complaints. And a few logical fallacies. Here are all the ones I could parse:
- "It's the FORTRAN of our times."
- It's the COBOL of our times.
- "deep seated aversion to languages where whitespace has fundamental syntactic significance".
- "And also where the simplest "Hello world!" program is busted between v2 and v3 (true story)"
- "My stomach turns in a knot at the introduction of EVERY trendy language"
- "I am almost always focused on productization qualities such as maintainability, performance, and any number of other "-ilities"."
- Nobody [cares] about Your language unless You can produce executable
- "It's ghastly. The Python Tools for Visual Studio eases the pain with a full symbolic/visual debugger but still..."
- "the socialist theme of universities leads to preference for open source and "free" over professionally developed and maintained tools... Meanwhile I really like JavaScript as a free wheeling scripting language."
- "Python ... is an inferior language. I can trust a well-engineered JavaScript system."
- "it's worse than fortran because it has a dedicated following"
- "my indictment is maintainability once productized. I always have a fear of building legacy packages that, once a mountain is built and is difficult to move, that people of the future will curse my name"
- "rationally, the continuing investment in the Node/TypeScript infrastructure places JavaScript in an entirely different infrastructure realm than Python"
- "Python doesn't have its equivalent of Node.js"
- "as a LANGUAGE JavaScript has great infrastructure across device types, OS brands, and across every level of scale now imaginable"
- Four separate reasoning-by-analogy: Lisp, FoxPro, PHP, and Perl. (e.g., "Amazon did amazing things with perl.") Somehow a failure involving these languages (or ecosystems or whatever) indicts Python because they're all "trendy" (I think.)
Yes. There were others that made less sense. I've omitted them.
TL;DR: These people don't seem to know what they're talking about. The posts are universally fact-free, so we're just listening to folks rambling randomly about Python.
TL;DR: These people don't seem to know what they're talking about. The posts are universally fact-free, so we're just listening to folks rambling randomly about Python.
Some responses. Feel free to use these when someone asks you why you're still using Python.
- That makes no sense
- That makes no sense
- The languages which are totally free of whitespace appear to be C and maybe C++. This principle rules out JavaScript, since the ASI rules involve wrangling ";" in place of the evil whitespace.
- This is a weird complaint. Stuff changed. How is that a problem? Are you saying change is a problem? What's this then? https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es5/
- Trendy is a problem? Really?
- Who isn't focused on quality attributes?
- http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/shipping/freezing/
- What does "ghastly" mean?
- What's a "socialist theme"? How is JavaScript "free-wheeling"? What does that even mean?
- What is "inferior" being measured? Alphabetically? (Python comes after Javascript, so it's in an inferior position alphabetically?)
- How is a dedicated following a problem?
- http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html Python is second to Java.
- "continuing investment"? By whom? And how does this "investment" compare with Python?
- What's wrong with twisted, tornado, Gunicorn, and Nginx? Don't they count?
- Python is available more-or-less everywhere. Without a specific coverage gap, this makes no sense.
- Also known as the False Equivalence fallacy. Without details of the failure mode, equivalence with Python isn't established.
Omitted is a random discussion on how Ruby is "rigorously defined". The implication seems to be that Python somehow might not be rigorously defined or something. It's not clear what the sub-thread was about, so I ignored it.
This thread seemed to involve two kinds of complaints:
This thread seemed to involve two kinds of complaints:
- Utter nonsense.
- Lies that are pretty east to refute.