It's great for beginners. Then it turns into a mess.
- A huge ecosystem of good third-party libraries.
- Named arguments.
- Multiple inheritance.
- It's easy to learn and read. However, it's only easy to learn and read at the start. Once you get past "Hello world" Python can get really ugly and counterintuitive.
- The Pythonic philosophy that "There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it." As someone who loves working within rules and rigid frameworks, I love this philosophy! As someone who writes Python, I really wish Python actually stuck to this philosophy. See below.
- Forced indentation. Some love it because it enforces consistency and a degree of readability. Some hate it because they think it enforces the wrong consistency. To each their own.
- Dynamic typing. There are lots of dynamically-typed languages and lots of statically-typed languages. Which kind of typing is better isn't a Python debate, it's a general programming debate.
-
400 ways (more or less) to interpolate strings. This prints "Hello Robin!" 3 times:
user = {'name': "Robin"} print(f"Hello {user['name']}!") print("Hello {name}!".format(**user)) print("Hello %(name)s!" % user)If there was a unique and obvious use-case for each of these then that would be one thing, but there's not.
-
69 top-level functions that you have to just memorize. GvR's explanation sounds nice, but in reality it makes things confusing.
-
mapdoesn't return a list, even though the whole point of a mapping function is to create one list from another. Instead it returns amapobject, which is pretty much useless since it's missingappend,reverse, etc. So, you always have to wrap it inlist(), or use a list comprehension, which, speaking of... -
List comprehensions are held up as an excellent recent-ish addition to Python. People say they're readable. That's true for simple examples (e.g.
[x**2 for x in range(10)]) but horribly untrue for slightly more complex examples (e.g.[[row[i] for row in matrix] for i in range(4)]). I chalk this up to... -
Weird ordering in ternary/one-line expressions. Most languages follow a consistent order where first you declare conditions, then you do stuff based the on those conditions:
if user.isSignedIn then user.greet else errorfor user in signedInUsers do user.greetPython does this in the opposite order:
user.greet if user.isSignedIn else error[user.greet for user in signedInUsers]This is fine for simple examples. It's bad for more complex logic because you have to first find the middle of the expression before you can really understand what you're reading.
-
Syntax for tuples. If you write a single-item tuple
(tuple,)but forget the trailing comma, it's no longer a tuple but an expression. This is a really easy mistake to make. Considering the only difference between tuples and lists is mutability, it would make much more sense to use the same syntax[syntax]as lists, which does not require a trailing comma, and add afreezeorimmutablemethod. Speaking of... -
There's no way to make
dicts or complex objects immutable. -
Regular expressions require a lot of boilerplate:
re.compile(r"regex", re.I | re.M)Compared to JavaScript or Ruby:
/regex/ig -
The goofy string literal syntaxes:
f'',u'',b'',r''. -
The many "magic" __double-underscore__ attributes that you just have to memorize.
-
You can't reliably catch all errors and their messages in one statement. Instead you have to use something like
sys.exc_info()[0]. You shouldn't have a catch-all in production of course, but in development it's very useful, so this unintuitive extra step is annoying. -
Dev environments. Setting up an environment is a problem in any langauge, but other languages have solved the problem better than Python. For example, while
npmhas its warts, it is widely accepted that a fresh environment should be set up withnpm i && npm run [script]. Meanwhile each Python project seems to require a unique mish-mash ofpipandpipenvandvenvand other shell commands.
Most programmers will acknowledge criticisms of their favorite language. Instead, Pythonists will say, "You just don't understand Python."
Most programmers will say a piece of code is bad if it's inefficient or hard to read. Pythonists will say a piece of code is bad if "it isn't Pythonic enough." This is about as helpful as someone saying your taste in music is bad because "it isn't cultured enough."
Pythonists have a bit of a superiority complex.
@dtonhofer Python is just a worse Perl.
Amen. For grins, I spent 6 hours today writing a "simple" python script that parses a file, selects some matching lines using regex, categorizes them into two lists, combines them under certain conditions, then greps another list generated from another file for matches.
And then I wrote it in perl. In under 30 minutes.
Sure, I've been using perl since the pink camel book. But even if I subtract out the time spent doing Google searches for silly stuff like "how to create a class instance variable in python" (in a constructor, silly!) and setting many, many print statements to figure out why a two-nested-group regex match is returned as a list of tuples (never mind the fact that the list itself is mutable), and that python "re" doesn't support multiple group matches (but python "regex" does, but good luck Googling that, because you get all the regex hits for "re"), I still spent about 3 hours on it. It shouldn't be this difficult and arcane.
And call me old-school, but I'm pretty certain that data encapsulation is a necessary component of any language that claims to be object-oriented. Which makes python not an object-oriented language, despite what Pythonists want you to believe (I believe this quote sums up the iron-clad reason why python doesn't include encapsulation: "After all, we're all consenting adults here." )