[HN Gopher] Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
___________________________________________________________________
Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
Author : 0xmohit
Score : 942 points
Date : 2020-11-12 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| Donckele wrote:
| Good for you Guido!
| jawns wrote:
| I would be curious to hear about other people who "retired" then
| went back to work.
|
| I feel like if I reached the FIRE point, I would continue to
| work, but entirely on my own terms, not as an employee of
| somebody else. Even at my favorite jobs, where I got to spend the
| majority of my time doing interesting things, having to deal with
| red tape, institutional slowness, upper management, etc. was not
| fun, and I can't imagine it getting any better when you know you
| are now working only because it's your hobby.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| At his level, there's very little red tape, institutional
| slowness and management to deal with.
| kortilla wrote:
| As long as he doesn't do anything that impacts the actual
| business. DEs working on Microsoft products absolutely have
| red tape and institutional slowness.
| NordSteve wrote:
| I have exactly that deal at MS (and I know many others who
| do), and I'm a couple levels away from DE.
|
| I'm later in my career, don't need the job for $$ (they know
| it), lead a great team, work on a meaningful project that I
| pitched in an area where I'm an expert, great support from
| management. The only thing remotely close to "red tape and
| institutional slowness" is about making sure what we build
| meets the promises (privacy and compliance, for example) that
| we've made to customers.
| chillacy wrote:
| Not only that but he probably has a small legion of full time
| developers working on his projects now that no normal FIRE
| savings would be able to afford.
| npsimons wrote:
| > I feel like if I reached the FIRE point, I would continue to
| work, but entirely on my own terms, not as an employee of
| somebody else.
|
| I'm right there with you - this is my number one goal for FIRE,
| is basically to not have to put up with anyone else's
| idiosyncrasies but my own. The only way I could see that
| changing is if I see a group of people worth working with, or a
| project worthwhile enough to work with other people, or I would
| feel an obligation to be a mentor to others.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| Careful with FIRE though. Don't fully sacrifice living with
| the goal of doing it later. I realize I'm not old by any
| stretch, but I'm at 40 next year. I've definitely made some
| sub-optimal decisions with money, but the experiences were
| mostly worth it. My retirement goal is to be able to do it by
| the time my kid is out of college - 14 years from now, unless
| she's smart and does the 5th year I never did. Anyhow, I
| digress, but I'm glad we traveled, ate, bought a house, sold
| a house, moved around a bit, etc. because even as income
| continues upward (along with some wealth if that's what you
| want to call our tech equity comp), life still gets harder in
| non-financial areas.
|
| I'm convinced the worst thing we do to our kids is shove them
| through school and stick them behind a desk the day they're
| done. I didn't break into tech until my mid 30s, but for the
| folks who came out of college doing this, you have a
| legitimate shot to be set before you turn 40. That said, if I
| could rewind, I'd happily push my own retirement goals back a
| few more years in exchange for a financially secure year off
| in my 20's or early 30's.
| btkramer9 wrote:
| What would you do in your financially secure year off in
| your 20's or 30's?
| ghaff wrote:
| Not the parent, but I would have primarily traveled.
| Might have hiked the AT or something like that.
|
| That said, although I didn't take extended time off, I
| did always max out my vacation time and took month-long
| trips to places like Nepal.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| I'd travel. I mean, we travel now, but not way off the
| beaten path. And we're mostly working around the school
| calendar (I'm ok being a little looser with that than my
| wife is). I'd also spend some time learning something
| that doesn't translate to money - get better at golf,
| work on my skating, etc. I'd also do enough nothing to be
| ready to go back to work by the end of it!
| aaronax wrote:
| I bought a sailboat and lived on it while traveling up
| and down the east coast of the USA, and Bahamas. Lots of
| learning and character development.
| npsimons wrote:
| Triple Crown of Hiking.
| npsimons wrote:
| Oh, trust me, I've definitely drank deeply of the pleasures
| of life and plan to continue down that road, just on a
| smaller scale. Seven course meal with wine pairings at Chez
| TJ in Mountain View when I did my Google on-site interview
| was definitely worth it.
|
| I'm also in my early 40's. I've been working nearly 20
| years, I'm just looking at another 10 years in this job,
| and I don't think I can take it. The being stuck behind a
| desk for a majority of my waking hours during my 20's and
| 30's definitely resonates, and despite my passion for
| software, I (relatively) recently re-learned just how good
| physical exertion feels.
|
| So yeah, I cut back on a number of things to reduce my
| monthly burn rate, but I'm not suffering by any means. If
| anything, I'm happier now with less, and seriously
| considering if I need to continue working, or maybe I can
| coastFIRE. The possibility has not escaped me that maybe
| it's just not the right job for me, and perhaps I'd be
| better off consulting or even trying micropreneurship, but
| on a more relaxed schedule.
|
| I do wish that when I was laid off in 2001 (my early 20's)
| I had hiked the PCT instead of trying to start a consulting
| business. Burned through my savings, and I probably would
| have just as much money at the end of the PCT through-hike,
| and definitely been happier.
| breckinloggins wrote:
| Counterpoint: I sacrificed a lot of my 30s to become debt-
| free. 40 now and pretty close to FIRE (well I don't know
| about the retiring part, but the FI part is almost there).
|
| It was totally worth it.
|
| In the end, it's a personal decision. I do agree that if
| you find the majority of weeks to be acutely miserable,
| then you should honestly ask yourself if you're giving up
| too much present for an uncertain future.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| I did as well, and we've remained debt free for a while.
| We're now in that cash poor phase since I seem to love
| pre-IPO companies :) Was it worth it? To some degree, but
| at the same time there are some big things on the list
| that we will probably have to defer for a while now that
| we have a school-aged child, a pet, etc. All I can say
| is, do some of those things, and don't fixate too badly
| on sacrificing everything to retire early. Family,
| friends, relationships matter, and so on.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think it really depends. I could see continuing working for
| someone longer in an IC role if no one is breathing down my
| neck to do things I don't really want to do and, especially, if
| I could negotiate flexibility in terms of time off, etc. I'm
| actually pretty close on both those things today and, post-
| COVID, I could see making adjustments more in that general
| direction.
|
| ADDED: As Denvercoder9 writes, _some_ companies /groups can be
| pretty good about being hands-off a senior person who they want
| and also know doesn't _need_ the job. Others, of course, are
| not. Certainly many Sun folks did not sit well with Oracle.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| We're in the same boat, but given that this is HN and I don't
| know if you're actually a billionaire or something, let's
| assume we both aren't. I'm not, for sure.
|
| This is a rational position for folks like us who a) work to
| live, and b) probably haven't built anything to the level of
| the second most popular language in the world.
|
| Now say you're Guido. I don't know him, but I feel like we're
| on a first name basis. Guido is clearly driven to invent, and
| has developed one of the major building blocks of modern tech.
| He's probably set for life financially, but Guido has the urge
| to innovate. Along comes Microsoft, who basically is paying him
| to do whatever he wants, however he wants. If you're Guido, you
| take that.
|
| Now if you're me (and it sounds like probably you too), we
| don't have those kinds of offers, and I personally don't have
| that specific drive either. Ideal retirement for me is more
| time in my yard and also probably spending the cold months
| starting app projects that I'll never finish. The way life
| should be!
| marcinzm wrote:
| >I feel like if I reached the FIRE point, I would continue to
| work, but entirely on my own terms, not as an employee of
| somebody else.
|
| If you want do to something that impacts or depends on other
| people then you will never be solely on your own terms. Plenty
| of people burn out of OSS because they think otherwise and then
| the angry users eat away at them. Likewise being FIRE doesn't
| mean you have unlimited resources so if you want more resource
| you will need to get them on someone else's terms.
|
| I've known a number of senior people at these companies that
| basically get to do whatever they want, pitch projects and then
| have teams whose job is to work out the details. Their name
| provides so much political clout that the org bends around them
| rather than the other way around.
|
| Personally I work at startups as a hands on manager so
| generally haven't had much red tape, institutional slowness,
| upper management, etc. hassles to deal with. Would continue
| doing so if I reached FIRE although might cut down my hours.
| lostmsu wrote:
| If it is any indication, I have seen a spike in activity in
| IronPython3 repo [0], which previously looked abandoned.
|
| [0] https://github.com/IronLanguages/ironpython3
| 1-6 wrote:
| Yay, that's exciting. IronPython is necessary for scripting
| into my .Net/C#-based Revit but it's been stuck on IP2 forever.
| jMyles wrote:
| Is this a sign of the path for Python to finally become part of a
| typical web and consumer toolchain?
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Is this a sign of the path for Python to finally become part
| of a typical web and consumer toolchain?_
|
| Maybe? A likely first step would probably be something like an
| Electron fork/distro with Python built in, along the lines of
| the abandoned PythonWebkit:
| https://www.gnu.org/software/pythonwebkit/
| bmitc wrote:
| That's all well and good, but it drives me crazy Microsoft
| refused and refuses to invest in F#, which could have very well
| been the Python of today if they had paid any attention to it.
| iammiles wrote:
| As another F# enthusiast, I share the sentiment, but
| practically speaking I don't think F# would have been in any
| position to be the Python of today. It might have had a greater
| chance if .Net Core existed 15 years ago, but being tied to
| Windows was a big show-stopper regardless.
| bmitc wrote:
| I agree that my comment takes into account too much
| hindsight, but certainly this is part of the pain. If
| Microsoft had transitioned .NET to be cross-platform much
| sooner or from the beginning, then they would have been
| better off. I was recently surprised to learn that Mono
| basically existed from the beginning of .NET, as I had no
| idea it was so old, so it's clear that people wanted
| something like .NET Core from the beginning.
|
| It's confusing to me that Microsoft embarked on their Iron
| <x> project, or whatever it was called, to stress test the
| CLR, got F# out of the project, and then decided to sit on
| it. They have incorporated F# features into C#, but it is
| confusing to me that they saw the rising popularity of Python
| and decided to let it happen unchecked because C# will never
| be F# or a language that appeals to Python programmers.
| lostmsu wrote:
| It worked on Mono
| justin66 wrote:
| > F#, which could have very well been the Python of today
|
| There's a phrase you don't see every day.
| altrunox wrote:
| > which could have very well been the Python of today if they
| had paid any attention to it.
|
| Wow, really? I'm a big fan of Clojure and F#, but IDK, I think
| there is a bias against functional languages since they, IMO,
| are harder to start doing stuff.
| bmitc wrote:
| You can write F# just as you would with Python. This would be
| just using OOP or just a collection of functions operating on
| simple struct- or dictionary-like types, using for loops,
| using list comprehensions, using if-else, etc. It will look
| very similar and be just as easy or easier to understand.
| oaiey wrote:
| F# is a community with an independent mindset. That is not a
| good investment target. Also there is a factor is 100:1 between
| C# and F# developers. I think the investment is maybe even in
| favor of F# compared to that.
| MadWombat wrote:
| "Embrace, extend and extinguish" (tm)
|
| I might need to branch out into other languages.
| Trias11 wrote:
| Make Python Great Again!
| _the_inflator wrote:
| With Anders Hejlsberg also at Microsoft, maybe they do something
| like type-safe Python similar to TypeScript?
|
| Anyway, congrats to both MS and Anders! This will be very
| interesting for Python.
| Anka33 wrote:
| And {}
| duckerude wrote:
| > something like type-safe Python similar to TypeScript
|
| That already exists, and van Rossum worked on it: http://mypy-
| lang.org/
| ehsankia wrote:
| Also Pyre [0] by Facebook and Pytype [1] by Google. More
| importantly, the core part (type annotations) allowing these
| libraries to exist has been added to core python for years
| now and keeps on evolving, so it is an ongoing effort.
|
| EDIT: As mentioned below, also added Pyright [2] by Microsoft
|
| [0] https://github.com/facebook/pyre-check
|
| [1] https://github.com/google/pytype
|
| [2] https://github.com/microsoft/pyright
| tracnar wrote:
| You forgot the one made by Microsoft, Pyright (and
| PyLance).
| bmitc wrote:
| Isn't that just F#?
| augusto-moura wrote:
| F# is not even close of Python, they are very distinct
| bmitc wrote:
| Of course, one is a sanely designed language. :)
|
| Joking aside, my question centered around that if one wants
| a type-safe Python, why wouldn't you just want something
| similar to F#?
| augusto-moura wrote:
| This is the same as asking for typed JS and getting Rust
| recommended just because the syntax is similar.
|
| They are totally different, the core paradigm of
| programming is totally changed and most of the points of
| JS are not in Rust (meta-programming, garbage collection,
| community)
| duckerude wrote:
| You can add typing to an existing codebase, saving you
| vast amounts of work compared to rewriting in a different
| language.
| bmitc wrote:
| Can that really be done for Python and the vast amount of
| libraries? I don't get the sense that one could simply
| slap on a static type system on Python and get libraries
| typed for free.
|
| That is unless we're talking about a gradual typing
| system for Python, where new Python code could be typed
| and integrated into untyped codebases, similar to Racket
| and Typed Racket.
| duckerude wrote:
| The existing type system (see e.g. http://mypy-lang.org/)
| is gradual. You can mix typed and untyped code, at the
| cost of some safety.
|
| You can also write type stubs for libraries that don't
| provide type information.
| estomagordo wrote:
| In the sense that indentation has syntactical meaning, yes.
| Otherwise, no no no.
| bmitc wrote:
| I don't understand. You can take Python code and basically
| write the equivalent in F#, ignoring many of F#'s
| additional features. It would look similar (probably even
| be cleaner) and would be type-safe.
| ExcavateGrandMa wrote:
| Always thought python were a virus on windows...
|
| Still using python 2.7 with GNU/Linux in 2020...
|
| Okay!
| shangxiao wrote:
| I'm quietly hoping they'll ask him to work on a typescript-style
| of project that adds static typing as a layer on top of Python :)
| daxfohl wrote:
| Ironically I had just stumbled across his LinkedIn profile for
| some reason last night and it was "retired, recruiters please get
| the memo" or something of that sort.
| punnerud wrote:
| Why do I get a bad feeling about Microsoft's open source effort?
| And it is just getting stronger by the years.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| I'd really like to see move emphasis on types. Working in C#
| lately made me realize once again how shit it is writing non-
| trivial applications without strong type checking.
| m0zg wrote:
| Sources familiar with their thinking say Torvalds and Stallman
| will join Microsoft early next year.
|
| On a more serious note, I hope Van Rossum and Hejlsberg spend
| lots of quality time together and thoroughly pick each other's
| brains. This could result in great things in the programming
| language space.
| SirYandi wrote:
| You don't happen to have anywhere I could read about Stallman
| potentially joining Microsoft? I find it hard to believe he
| would.
| m0zg wrote:
| It was a joke. :-) Hence "sources familiar with their
| thinking" and "on a more serious note".
| FreekNortier wrote:
| Python for Excel data manipulation would be great.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| It's been at the top of their public feedback request page for
| ages: https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-
| windows-...
|
| They did officially respond in 2018 and put out a survey for
| thoughts, don't think they've followed up since but they
| definitely know demand is there.
| carabiner wrote:
| First-class integration in Excel would be a game changer. Holy
| shit. Though adding a multiline editor with indentation in
| Excel would be really nice as well. We've got to stop
| pretending Excel functions don't constitute a programming
| language.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| Bring in versioning/snapshotting with some git integration
| while you're at it...
|
| The finance folks I work with are fucking wizards. I'm
| convinced many of them would have made great engineers given
| what they can accomplish building applications in what might
| be the world's worst IDE.
| jaimebuelta wrote:
| Interestingly enough, Libre Office (and OpenOffice before that)
| allow you to use Python internally for Macros through PyUNO,
| which is a pain to use given the lack of documentation, but
| amazingly powerful.
|
| It was one of my first usages of Python, and used that to
| create quite complex Spreadsheets
| claudeganon wrote:
| Office suite automation with Python would be great across the
| board. The external python libraries that do this are pretty
| clunky and VB scripting is a hot mess.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Office now allows you to script it using Typescript, so you
| don't have to use VB any more.
| claudeganon wrote:
| Oh that's cool! Haven't had to do anything with it in a few
| years, but excited to check out how this works.
| jannes wrote:
| I'm really curious what you are talking about?
|
| I could only find "Office Scripts", which doesn't work in
| the normal desktop apps (only the web version).
|
| Edit: I just found out about "Script Lab". Is that what you
| are talking about? https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-
| us/product/office/WA10438...
| binarycodedhex wrote:
| Agreed. VBA makes by fingers and eyes ooze gangrenous pus.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I really dislike Windows but Microsoft is doing everything it can
| lately to please developers. It's kind of working, I have to say.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| I hope that when Microsoft announced Windows 10 is the last one,
| it meant that the next will be Linux distribution able to run
| Windows apps better than Wine.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Hopefully he is going to make a really good port of Python to
| .Net.
| poma88 wrote:
| That is more boring than retirement.
| g051051 wrote:
| Man, there's so much stuff I want to do but don't have time for.
| I can't imagine retirement being so dull that I would go back to
| corporate work.
| threesmegiste wrote:
| VBA out PYTHON in
| kevas wrote:
| hey hey hey...
| Deimorz wrote:
| Huh. A throwaway account here on HN said that he was working at
| Microsoft 8 days ago, and I assumed they were wrong and thinking
| of Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24983394
|
| Sorry, throwaway account! Apparently I was the one who was wrong!
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Hopefully Microsoft will make Python a first class language
| internally. There's still far too much pressure to use C# for
| everything.
| MR4D wrote:
| So instead of BDFL for Python, he's going "make using Python
| better".
|
| Congrats to him for finding something fun to do in retirement -
| dictators usually end up with a different outcome. ;)
|
| I'm looking forward to seeing the future of Python - I think this
| move will be great for the whole community, and lets him push
| boundaries without being bogged down on the management side.
| DylanDmitri wrote:
| I'm hoping for a Jupyter/Excel hybrid, but that's mostly
| wishful thinking.
| [deleted]
| likelybear wrote:
| That's arguably the goal of
| [Pluto.jl](https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl). It's a (Julia-
| specific) reactive notebook that automatically updates all
| affected cells and has no hidden state.
| antupis wrote:
| That looks so good that I am thinking about learning Julia.
| O_H_E wrote:
| Well then I would like to through this your way.
| https://mitmath.github.io/18S191/Fall20/
| DylanDmitri wrote:
| Ooh that's really good, thank you for sharing!
| st1x7 wrote:
| Please no. Excel is great when it stays within its lane and
| use case and doesn't try to be everything. Jupyter is okay-
| ish is some places but in general is way overused. Mixing
| them together would be a move in the wrong direction and a
| bit of a mess.
| causalmodels wrote:
| It's already been done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od-1cE
| ac9U4&feature=emb_titl...
| gota wrote:
| If you mean to retire VB in favor of Python for writing
| macros, I'm all for it. Not much Jupyter though
| Aperocky wrote:
| Oh no.
| askvictor wrote:
| There's been a few projects in this space (PySpread is the
| first that jumps to mind), but also, not too long ago (last
| year maybe?), MS was investigating making Python a first-
| class inhabitant of Excel, so might already be in the
| pipeline.
| sireat wrote:
| Solve "How to deploy my sweet Python script on grandma's
| computer" problem.
|
| That is some reasonable way to deploy to someone who is not a
| programmer nor tech person.
|
| Not sure how much has changed since this was written:
| http://effbot.org/pyfaq/can-python-be-compiled-to-machine-co...
|
| PyInstaller.. well.. it works okay with std.. sometimes it does
| not. It is the Electron solution.. add pandas to a project and
| you get a 600MB install.
|
| As developers we can manage to deal with package managers.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Such a shame things like that used to be simple - Py2Exe was
| fine and Windows didn't freak the hell out at the sight of an
| unsigned binary.
| askvictor wrote:
| In the education space (where Python is pretty big), the
| biggest problem we have is that Python code isn't 'shareable'
| so it's hard for kids to show off their creations to Grandma.
| Sure, there are some products which work to work around that
| (like repl.it), but the core problem remains - a student
| can't easily get their Python program to run on an arbitrary
| computer. It's why I'm very tempted to move to JS for
| teaching, despite all of the dragons lurking there.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Not just to grandma. I have trouble deploying my scripts to
| my colleagues.
| bxbna wrote:
| I'm not sure that Python will profit form this. He has had 50%
| positions before and most of the new things he did were
| precisely in the period in which he did not work for a
| corporation.
|
| If anything, this further corporate influence on Python
| development is not something to be applauded. I bet there will
| be lots of more churn in the next five years, big announcements
| and no results.
| eznzt wrote:
| I hope they use Microsoft's money to make Python fast (or at
| least fast enough)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| If I remember correctly, Guido resigned as BDFL in 2018.
| ImaCake wrote:
| >Congrats to him for finding something fun to do in retirement
| - dictators usually end up with a different outcome. ;)
|
| I guess he is going for a Diocletian cabbage farmer style
| retirement.
| nickbauman wrote:
| This is good news. It's sad that I find a lot of interesting
| possibilities on Azure end up being "windows only." Hopefully
| having more support for Python will fix some of that.
| business007 wrote:
| Why dictator? lmao I'm not familiar with the guy on anything
| else than he's PHP's creator
| Pxtl wrote:
| In the off chance this isn't a joke: Python, not PHP. And he
| wasn't just its creator, he was the head of the project for
| its whole life until his recent retirement. Typical term in
| the OSS community for one guy who is in charge of a massive
| OSS project is Benevolent Dictator For Life, or BDFL. And
| Guido was definitely one of those.
| URfejk wrote:
| A dictator found himself a new master.
|
| :)
| systemvoltage wrote:
| An official package manager with great dependency resolution
| would be fantastic. Or over take pipenv or poetry and sponsor
| it through Microsoft $$$.
|
| The biggest hurdle to python right now is the stupid package
| managers. We need cargo for Python.
| meowface wrote:
| poetry feels like the closest equivalent to cargo that I've
| used. pipenv is better than the previous status quo but is
| still oddly unstable, with random new issues I encounter with
| every release. poetry "just works" for me, has better
| dependency resolution, and IMO has a nicer interface and
| terminal output to boot.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| But if you fix Python package managers that will remove 50%
| of the audience for Docker. Think of the children! ;)
| roel_v wrote:
| I only know a bit about Python - in what sense is pip not a
| package manager?
| andi999 wrote:
| in the functioning sense.
| estomagordo wrote:
| care to elaborate?
| nickjj wrote:
| > in what sense is pip not a package manager?
|
| It is a package manager but it lacks features that many
| other package managers have in Ruby, Node, Elixir, and
| other languages.
|
| For example there's no concept of a separate lock file with
| pip.
|
| Sure you can pip freeze your dependencies out to a file but
| this includes dependencies of dependencies, not just your
| app's top level dependencies.
|
| The frozen file is good to replicate versions across builds
| but it's really bad for human readability.
|
| Ideally we should have a file made for humans to define
| their top level dependencies (with version pinning support)
| and a lock file that has every dependency with exact pinned
| versions.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| FWIW I had a lot of success using
| https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools to have
| dependencies automatically managed in a virtualenv.
|
| * Basically I would have a single bash script that every
| `.py` entrypoint links to.
|
| * Beside that symlink is a `requirements.in` file that
| just lists the top-level dependencies I know about.
|
| * There's a `requirements.txt` file generated via pip-
| tools that lists all the dependencies with explicit
| version numbers.
|
| * The bash script then makes sure there's a virtual
| environment in that folder & the installed package list
| matches exactly the `requirements.txt` file (i.e. any
| extra packages are uninstalled, any missing/mismatched
| version packages are installed correctly).
|
| This was great because during development if you want to
| add a new dependency or change the installed version
| (i.e. pip-compile -U to update the dependency set), it
| didn't matter what the build server had & could test any
| diff independently & inexpensively. When developers
| pulled a new revision, they didn't have to muck about
| with the virtualenv - they could just launch the script
| without thinking about python dependencies. Finally,
| unrelated pieces of code would have their own dependency
| chains so there wasn't even a global project-wide set of
| dependencies (e.g. if 1 tool depends on component A, the
| other tools don't need to).
|
| I viewed the lack of `setup.py` as a good thing -
| deploying new versions of tools was a git push away
| rather than relying on chef or having users install new
| versions manually.
|
| This was the smoothest setup I've ever used for running
| python from source without adopting something like
| Bazel/BUCK (which add a lot of complexity for ingesting
| new dependencies as you can't leverage pip & they don't
| support running the python scripts in-place).
| musingsole wrote:
| Isn't that effectively the result of a typical `setup.py
| -> pip compile -> requirements.txt` flow?
|
| The setup.py file contains a human readable designation
| of requirements and then `pip compile` generates a
| requirements.txt with all deps' (and deps of deps')
| versions specified.
| xapata wrote:
| > Sure you can pip freeze your dependencies out to a file
| but this includes dependencies of dependencies, not just
| your app's top level dependencies.
|
| Isn't that a good thing?
|
| > no concept of a separate lock file with pip.
|
| setup.py/.cfg vs requirements.txt, no?
| baq wrote:
| yes, but don't underestimate the power of convention.
|
| if you make pip run 'pip freeze > requirements.txt.lock'
| after every 'pip install whatever', you almost solve that
| particular problem if setup.py is configured to parse
| that (it isn't by default and there's no easy way to do
| that!)
| xapata wrote:
| That's the whole point of distinguishing between logical
| dependencies and reproducibility dependencies. I use
| setup.cfg to describe the logical dependencies, I supply
| a requirements.txt (or environment.yml, or a Dockerfile)
| to provide the tools necessary to create a deployable
| build.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Isn't that a good thing?
|
| Yes, a very good thing.
|
| > setup.py/.cfg vs requirements.txt, no?
|
| A lot of web applications aren't proper packages in the
| sense that you pip install them.
|
| They end up being applications you run inside of a Python
| interpreter that happen to have dependencies and you kick
| things off by running a web app server like gunicorn or
| uwsgi.
|
| For a Python analogy vs what other languages do, you
| would end up having a requirements.txt file with your top
| level dependencies and when you run a pip install, it
| would auto-generate a separate requirements.lock file
| with all deps pinned to their exact versions. Then you'd
| commit both files to version control, but you would only
| ever modify your requirements.txt by hand. If a lock file
| is present that gets used during a pip install, otherwise
| it would use your requirements.txt file.
|
| The above work flow is how Ruby, Elixir and Node's
| package managers operate out of the box. It seems to work
| pretty well in practice for ensuring your top level deps
| are readable and your builds are deterministic.
|
| Currently there's no sane way to replicate that behavior
| using pip. That's partly why other Python package
| managers have come into existence over the years.
| xapata wrote:
| I don't understand the distinction you're making. Are you
| pip-installing or not? If not, why not?
|
| My method for deploying a web application is to have a
| Dockerfile which pip-installs the Python package, but I
| could see someone using a Makefile to pip-install from
| requirements.txt instead. In fact, I use `make` to run
| the commands in my Dockerfile.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Are you pip-installing or not? If not, why not?
|
| I am running a pip install -r requirements.txt when I do
| install new dependencies. I happen to be using Docker
| too, but I don't think that matters much in the end.
| snazz wrote:
| It does a bad job of dealing with versioning conflicts and
| multiple projects, so Python developers resort to hacks
| like virtual environments to get work done. Compared to
| Cargo or even Go modules, it's not a great solution. It's
| also missing lots of features that are standard in other
| package managers.
| ptx wrote:
| What's wrong with virtual environments? The required
| tools come bundled with Python nowadays and are super
| easy to use.
| orf wrote:
| The need for a virtualenv has nothing to do with pip.
| _Python_ only has "global" dependencies due to the way
| its import system works.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Ruby works the same way, but bundler dependency manager
| solves it anyway to give you per-project dependencies not
| just system-wide dependencies. (I believe other well-
| liked dependency managers like cargo are largely based on
| bundler's semantics).
|
| Perhaps ruby was more "hackable" by bundler. (Bundler has
| now become part of ruby stdlib, but didn't start out that
| way, it definitely started hacking around the way the
| more fundamental stdlib 'rubygems' worked).
| orf wrote:
| so they've just automated the virtual environment
| creation then. There's nothing about pip that is global
| or not global. It unzips files from pypi into a
| directory. Python, not pip, doesn't really support a
| "node_modules" style setup. We use virtual environments
| (venv/) which is somewhat similar.
| zo1 wrote:
| Not quite true. Python import mechanics are quite
| hackable and controllable programmatically and externally
| via controlling the relevant PATH env variables. It's
| just that no one bothers with it and instead seems to
| rely on the set of global folder-path lookup mechanics
| that are standard.
|
| But nothing stops you from masking global-libraries with
| local library versions (similar to node_modules). Why
| hasn't anyone done this you may ask? I don't know the
| answer to that.
| orf wrote:
| There are a few reasons you can't have multiple versions
| of the same module at the same time. Consider a simple
| enum class defined in a package: two versions now have
| two different enum objects which may not compare equally.
| Maybe a function from module A would return Enum.A and
| pass it to module B, which would then compare A.Enum.A to
| B.Enum.A, which fails. Super confusing.
|
| So yes, Python's import system is dynamic enough to do
| crazy things, but I don't see how we can ever retrofit
| that into Python.
|
| Regarding dependencies installed into a project-local
| directory (node_modules): that's a virtual environment.
| Just more flexible.
| d0mine wrote:
| It may depend on you experience with each language. I
| have much more experience with Python than Go (almost
| none with Rust) and therefore I have much better time
| with python packaging tools (I don't remember a single
| issue, that I didn't find a satisfactory solution -- as
| much as possible in the packaging world with myriad
| conflicting use-cases)
|
| For example, my experience with `cargo` (that I mostly
| use to install command-line utilities such as rg, fd,
| dust): it is great when it works as written in the
| instructions but sometimes it doesn't (running `cargo`
| may involve a lot of compiling -- in contrast to `pip`
| which can use wheels transparently and avoid compiling
| even for modules with C extensions -- I guess there might
| be a way to do something similar with `cargo` though not
| by default).
| vmchale wrote:
| > so Python developers resort to hacks like virtual
| environments to get work done
|
| It's really hard with many deps, it's why cabal (for
| instance) moved away from a global model.
| [deleted]
| pmiller2 wrote:
| GP comment was objecting to "stupid" package managers.
| Maybe they think pip is stupid, because it's unquestionably
| a package manager.
| zo1 wrote:
| Honestly - My non-polite, personal impression of all the
| complaints is that they're borne from a very specific
| development environment. One that includes lots of
| dependencies similar to "npm", wants "docker style" local
| development, and the devs seem to think dependency-
| management is hard and you need complicated "semantic"
| versioning and version operators... but really it's just
| because they're working in a complex ecosystem of
| microservices.
|
| But, for the other 99% projects though: Most of their
| dependencies won't break compatibility, you'll never
| uncover a hard version dependency that the package manager
| can't solve, you'll never need to "freeze" your dependency
| versions and you can pretty much just rely on a semi-
| persistent environment with all your necessary packages
| installed and semi-regularly updated. Essentially smooth-
| sailing.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It's a package manager in the vein of "old-school" package
| managers that came from Linux distros and whatnot. It
| maintains a global dependency chain across your entire
| machine. This can be good for security fixes in that you
| only have 1 copy of a package & everyone references it.
| This is not good for development because it doesn't provide
| a sandbox'ed environment for you to do development in (ala
| cargo as others have mentioned). It also causes issue if
| you try to install 2 packages but they rely on incompatible
| versions of a popular package meaning you have to choose
| which package you want installed.
|
| Some of this has been mitigated with virtualenv but having
| a project express it's packages & have that automatically
| reflected in the environment.
|
| Finally, Cargo to my knowledge actually lets multiple
| dependencies exist (even within the same project!!!) so
| that you can have a dependency like:
| dep1 -- dep3 <= v1.6 /
|
| < my awesome project> -------- dep3 >= 3.0 \ dep2 -- dep3
| >= 2.0
|
| That's not possible if you don't have the right language
| hooks because module resolution needs to be aware of the
| version of the library (i.e. when you go `import numpy`, it
| actually needs to be aware of the package it's being
| imported _from_ to resolve that correctly).
|
| Now whether or not it's a good idea to support this kind of
| dependency stuff can be controversial. In practice though
| clearly it does cause problems the larger your codebase
| gets as you're more likely to have some nested dependency
| chain that's time-consuming to upgrade so you'd rather move
| faster than make sure you're only running 1 version of the
| dependency.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| > Finally, Cargo to my knowledge actually lets multiple
| dependencies exist
|
| That's a bug, not a feature. It enables sloppy
| development and the disasters like on NPM
| cactus2093 wrote:
| For some reason I've run into this type of dependency
| chain issue many times in JS, but have never run into it
| in Python despite using both languages pretty heavily.
| Maybe because the JS ethos is to change things so
| quickly, if you're not making a major breaking change to
| your package's API every year or two then you're getting
| left behind (only kind of joking). Also probably because
| the standard library is so small in JS (or at least it
| used to be, and may projects want to be compatible with
| at least some older browsers) so the average number of
| dependencies that a typical library has is probably much
| higher than in Python.
|
| I really don't get the fuss about the global dependency
| management though, maybe I would change my mind if Python
| shipedp a great implementation of it. But I feel like the
| problem is already solvable in multiple ways with
| containers, VMs, or virtualenvs and I don't think yet
| another abstraction to separate environments would add
| much value to my day to day workflow building python
| apps.
| divbzero wrote:
| This is my experience too. I've never actually
| encountered a global dependency conflict with Python pip
| though in theory it's possible. But I _have_ encountered
| the same version conflict problem in dependency chains
| that exists with Node npm.
|
| And yet, I hear so many more complaints about Python pip
| and I really don't understand the disconnect. Perhaps
| dislike of pip is actually triggered by usability issues?
| And then people look for other reasons to explain their
| dislike?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| It happens with the data science/scientific programming
| stack a lot, at least twice in the last month I've pulled
| in a small dependency that changed my numpy version which
| broke everything.
| divbzero wrote:
| Thanks. I suppose it could be related to the rate of
| change in the ecosystem. Python's data science /
| scientific programming stack definitely changes faster
| than Python's web stack which is currently my primary use
| case.
|
| As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, resolving this
| dependency issue would require a change in the Python
| language itself.
| d0mine wrote:
| > It maintains a global dependency chain across your
| entire machine.
|
| There are per python binary, per user, per virtualenv
| installation (per project or per whatever you like) that
| make the conflict less likely.
|
| Sometime packages "vendor" their dependencies e.g., there
| is `pip._vendor.requests` (thus you may have different
| `requests` versions in the same environment).
|
| There were setuptools' multi-version installs
| https://packaging.python.org/guides/multi-version-
| installs/ (I don't remember using it explicitly ever --
| no need)
| dalfonso wrote:
| Microsoft already bought NPM so there's precedent.
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| Yeah, but do we REALLY want M$ to control, github, npm,
| node, rust, python, and ...
| vmchale wrote:
| We still have Idris and ATS.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Considering that half of all prominent functional PL
| researchers are hired by Microsoft Research I won't be
| too confident about that.
| coldtea wrote:
| M"$"? 1999 called, they want their edginess back...
| webmaven wrote:
| _> M "$"? 1999 called, they want their edginess back..._
|
| You realize that we're potentially just one leadership
| change away from returning to the 'bad old days', right?
| oblio wrote:
| You're missing the big picture. In 1999, Microsoft's
| revenue was at least 10x that of the closest competitor.
|
| It controlled the client (desktop) and was working on
| controlling the server, too.
|
| Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc didn't exist. Amazon was
| much smaller and in a different niche. Apple was trying
| to not keel over in 2 months.
|
| We're not a leadership change away from anything. The
| world has changed.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| Definitely this, but I doubt such a luminary of computer
| science will interested in such work.
|
| The XKCD comic on Python package managers/Python environments
| is not an exaggeration. I've always wanted to get more into
| Python but every time I attempt to, it's this hurdle that
| dissuades me.
|
| Edit: Also, I guess Poetry is another thing that came along
| since my last attempt.
| acqq wrote:
| > The XKCD comic on Python package managers/Python
| environments is not an exaggeration.
|
| Thanks, I haven't seen it before. It's really quite close
| to the state on my home machine:
|
| https://xkcd.com/1987/
|
| It's not that I couldn't eventually resolve the current
| state, it's that at the moment a few programs I regularly
| run work, in spite of the different dependencies they have,
| and I know that starting "cleaning up" will cost too much
| time.
| webmaven wrote:
| > > The XKCD comic on Python package managers/Python
| environments is not an exaggeration.
|
| _> Thanks, I haven 't seen it before. It's really quite
| close to the state on my home machine:_
|
| _> https://xkcd.com/1987/_
|
| Hmm. I've had machines with similar states, though never
| with _both_ Anaconda and Homebrew.
|
| Instead, I often had (in addition to the rest of the
| system-level snarl) isolated per-app Python interpreters
| that were specified & constructed with Buildout for
| development testing & deployment.
|
| Though I don't quite get the arrow from Homebrew 2.7 to
| Python.org 2.6. Is that actually a thing or hyperbole?
| acqq wrote:
| > Is that actually a thing or hyperbole?
|
| It's fiction, of course. Art often has to exaggerate to
| make a point. I exaggerated too, just to remain in the
| artistic rather than the technical spirit of the comics.
| But there are some important bits of truth there, like in
| every good joke.
| webmaven wrote:
| Of course. I just wasn't sure which bin that bit belonged
| to.
| shurane wrote:
| Is python the worst for package management?
|
| I thought C and C++ might have similar issues since
| there's no unified package management there either.
| Yajirobe wrote:
| pip is completely fine
| jevgeni wrote:
| It is, unless you want to ship.
| nojito wrote:
| Just ship a container to the server.
| robmurrer wrote:
| pip in virtualenv. It is solved problem.
| coldtea wrote:
| Not even pip developers believe "pip in virtualenv" makes
| python dependencies and package management a "solved
| problem"...
| user5994461 wrote:
| 90% of professional python developers believe that python
| dependencies is a solved problem (with pip and
| virtualenv).
|
| The rest is too vocal.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _90% of professional python developers believe that
| python dependencies is a solved problem (with pip and
| virtualenv)._
|
| 99% of professional python developers think that you've
| pulled this statistic out of your ass!
| webmaven wrote:
| _> >90% of professional python developers believe that
| python dependencies is a solved problem (with pip and
| virtualenv)._
|
| _> 99% of professional python developers think that you
| 've pulled this statistic out of your ass!_
|
| 72.6% of all statistics are made up, anyway.
| [deleted]
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| Spot on!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 90% of professional python developers believe that
| python dependencies is a solved problem (with pip and
| virtualenv).
|
| I doubt that even 90% of those professional python
| developers who believe that python dependencies is a
| solved problem believe that it is solved with pip and
| virtualenv; the conda faction has to be bigger than 10%.
| Plus there's the people that think pip/venv aren't
| enough, but that tools on top of them plug the gaps
| (poetry).
|
| But I think that the share of professional developers who
| see it as a solved problem at all is less than 90%.
| Obviously, we've all got some way of working with/around
| the issues, that doesn't mean that we don't feel that
| they exist.
| user5994461 wrote:
| If I can give my anecdote, the last 3 companies I worked
| at that were heavily using Python and the hundreds of
| developers in them were all relying on pip and
| virtualenv. And it worked just fine no matter what the HN
| crowd would have you believe.
|
| conda had minor usage in the last one for building a
| handful of special projects mixing C++ and Python code
| (highly specific code in the finance industry), after
| build the artifacts could go into the python repository
| (internal pypi) and be usable with pip. Everything was
| down to pip at the end of the day. As a matter of fact,
| the guys who used and pushed for conda were also the ones
| pushing the hardest for pip because pip is the answer to
| everything.
| jevgeni wrote:
| Well, if the consumers are all devs, then sure.
| jevgeni wrote:
| My pet conspiracy theory is that Docker was created in
| part because Python code is un-shipable otherwise.
| [deleted]
| ghshephard wrote:
| I often wonder what problem is being solved by Poetry,
| that pip with virtualenv(+wrappers) doesn't solve
| perfectly well. requirements.txt ensures you have the
| right version of everything in production, and virtualenv
| lets you explore various versions of libraries without
| risking any destabilization of your development
| environment.
|
| I struggle to see what spending time looking at Poetry
| will yield in terms of any actual benefit, though I would
| love to be informed/educated otherwise.
| freehunter wrote:
| virtualenv always feels like a hack to me. Too many times
| I've forgotten to activate the virtualenv halfway through
| a project and now I'm troubleshooting all the problems I
| just caused with some packages installed in the
| virtualenv and some globally and oh half of them aren't
| in my packages.txt so now I can't remember which package
| I needed for this...
|
| I don't expect my dev tools to be idiot proof, but they
| should at least try to be "I've been hacking for 18 hours
| straight and I just need to commit this last line and I
| can finally go to bed" proof.
| nickbauman wrote:
| So I hear Poetry is the way to go these days for python.
|
| But a plurality of the people I encounter in the Clojure
| community came there because leiningen (Clojure's package
| manager that uses Maven under the covers) "just works" and
| they got tired of having a tough time reproducing builds
| consistently on other platforms / OSs with Python; not to
| mention the performance gains of the JVM.
| shirakawasuna wrote:
| Poetry is very good: https://python-poetry.org/
|
| It should be heavily promoted as the official option and
| included with the distribution.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I'd love to see Poetry take off. I'm watching it pretty
| closely.
| transcranial wrote:
| Same here. Poetry has been a joy, after many bouts of
| frustration with pipenv.
| kamyarg wrote:
| Same, we switched from pipenv ~6 months ago, had not had to
| worry about package/env related stuff since then, "just
| works".
|
| "evangelized" a sibling team also to consider switching,
| they were sceptical but just recently they mentioned they
| also like it more.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Python's biggest hurdle is and always will be speed. Pip and
| wheels aren't great but I would rather stop using golang.
| That's a bigger win for me to stop maintaining proficiency
| and tooling for a language that I honestly consider inferior
| for the way I think about problems.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Strongly disagree. Python's adoption is primarily driven by
| how easy it is to get started (barring some nasties in
| datetime, typing, and ofcourse the package manager).
|
| Python is plenty fast for most automation tasks.
| fermigier wrote:
| Python is fast enough for many tasks, including number
| crunching for which it excels (as long as you are using
| the right libraries).
|
| Projects like Cython allow to tweak without too much
| effort the parts of a program that need an extra-boost.
|
| Last but not least, there have been discussions in the
| Python community in the last weeks of ways to speed up
| considerably the default (CPython) implementation.
|
| Hopefully, all of this will bear some fruits in the next
| 2-5 years. Guido will probably help from his new position
| at Microsoft.
| Radim wrote:
| > discussions in the Python community in the last weeks
| of ways to speed up CPython
|
| This piqued my interest. I found this, by Mark Shannon:
| https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-
| dev@python.org/...
|
| Is that what you mean?
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Only because libraries have to use C bindings to make it
| fast enough. I don't think Python performance is good
| enough when I have to stop writing in the language that
| we are benchmarking to get good results.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| You are talking past the point I am making. No doubt
| Python has excellent adoption because the language is
| incredibly idiomatic and easy to understand -- thus why
| it is my favorite language. Python is great in all of the
| ways you just stated but it could be better and I am
| saying that speed for CPU bound tasks is the way it could
| be better. I am so tired of binning Python in favor of
| golang the moment latency becomes important, I would like
| to use it all the time.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Python's biggest hurdle is it's lack of good tooling.
|
| Try building a Unix app, with data in standard Unix
| locations(bin, shared, lib, etc) and you'll find that you
| have to write custom code.
|
| And Google searches don't help :(
| robmurrer wrote:
| Better not move to NuGeT.eXe
| kitanata wrote:
| We use poetry for apps in production. At this point I think
| that's the winning solution and as it continues to grow and
| improve I think it will overtake all the others in this
| respect.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| I also use poetry for everything. I have 0 problems, things
| work on my mac, my interns pc, aws instances, I don't even
| see what problem people are having. Before that I was using
| pipenv, and before that just good old requirements.txt -
| there were a few occasional issues, but really not much
| even then. At this point, I suspect it is more about
| regurgitating a complaint than a real issue. But, I could
| be lucky and completely wrong...
| ifore wrote:
| - until a few months ago no way to sync an environment
| with a lockfile (remove packages that shouldn't be there)
|
| - no way to check if the lock file is up to date with the
| toml file
|
| - no way to install packages from source if the version
| number is calculated (this will likely never be fixed as
| it's a design decision to use static package metadata
| insetad of setup.py, but is an incompatibility with pip)
|
| - no way to have handle multiple environments: you get
| dependencies and dev-dependencies and that's it. You can
| fake it with extras, but it's a hack
|
| - if you upgrade to a new python minor version you also
| have to upgrade to the latest poetry version or things
| just fail (Something to do with the correct selection of
| vendored dependencies. May have since been fixed -- new
| python versions don't come out all that often for me to
| run into it. And in fairness the latest pip is typically
| bundled with each python so it avoids that issue)
|
| I still use poetry because it's more standard than hand-
| rolled pip freeze wrapper scripts, and there's definitely
| progress (the inability to sync packages was a hard
| requirement for me but is not fixed) but it's not quite
| there yet
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| If you don't need c or c++ dependencies it's ok. If you
| do, it's very very painful. To be fair, most of the DS
| libraries can be handled by conda, but if you need both
| conda and pip, then you're going to have a bad time.
| (Source: this is my life right now).
| roseway4 wrote:
| Much of Python's growth has been driven by data science.
| Here, the conda package manager is pretty ubiquitous. Conda
| packages system and other non-Python dependencies (such as
| the CUDA SDK), removing the need for data scientists to
| resolve these non-trivial dependencies themselves. This is
| likely unneeded/ unwanted for production web app
| deployments.
|
| Given the varied use cases for Python, the goal of a single
| package manager may be misguided.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| My understanding is that the people who developed Conda
| would love to have stuck with pip, and originally wanted
| to see about upgrading pip to support their use cases.
| And it was GvR himself who told them that that wasn't
| going to happen.
|
| That was a long time ago, though, when scientific
| computing was a small niche for Python. It might have
| been reasonable to say it's not worthwhile to take on all
| that extra work just to support the needs of a small
| minority of users. Fast forward the better part of a
| decade, and it turns out that scientific computing did
| not stay a small niche. I think that one could make a
| strong argument that, in retrospect, that brush-off did
| not end up ultimately serving the best interests of the
| Python community. It made the community more fragmentary,
| in a way that divided, and therefore hindered, efforts at
| addressing what has proven to be one of Python's biggest
| pain points.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Conda predates pip by perhaps a decade.
| mkl wrote:
| Really? The first release of pip was in 2011 [1] and the
| earliest release of Conda I can find is 1.1.0 in Nov.
| 2012 [2], and the first public commit (into an empty
| repo) was a month earlier [3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pip_(package_manager)
|
| [2] https://github.com/conda/conda/tags?after=1.3.0
|
| [3] https://github.com/conda/conda/commit/c9aea053d8619e1
| 754b24b...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| May be anaconda that I'm thinking of.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Anaconda was released in 2012, as well. Conda is a tool
| that is part of anaconda.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| This one:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaconda_(installer)
|
| I forgive myself, it's pretty confusing :D.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Ah. Name collisions suck.
| hobofan wrote:
| Yes, Poetry is great! I avoided Python for a long time due
| to it's bad package management/environment handling
| situation, but Poetry solved all my problems there.
| derefr wrote:
| People keep saying that about every new solution. But then
| another one comes along that's even better-er, and the
| previous one peters out.
|
| The biggest need for a package manager and its ecosystem is
| _continuity_ : the stance that new features and paradigms
| will be gradually shifted toward -- without package-
| ecosystem incompatibilities, without CLI commands just
| disappearing (but instead, with long deprecation
| timelines), etc.
|
| In other words, an officially-blessed package manager is
| one where, when something better-er comes along, it _gets
| absorbed by_ the existing thing, instead of replacing it.
|
| _That_ is what the Python ecosystem is missing.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't think it's that another one comes along that's
| better as much as it is the new "better" ends up missing
| some important corner case. Pipenv advertised itself as
| solving all problems, but once someone tries it in
| practice, they realize that it introduces a new problem:
| every little interaction takes literally 30 minutes for
| any non-toy project. I've heard mixed things about
| poetry, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least of it
| failed to behave as advertised just because this has been
| my experience with every package manager I've tried to
| use. And it's embarrassing when every other language has
| a package manager that _just works_.
|
| EDIT: It was probably misleading to characterize Pipenv
| as advertising itself as solving all problems; it's
| probably more correct to say that it's significant
| weaknesses weren't advertised and thus one has to invest
| considerably before discovering them for oneself.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Interesting. I haven't used pipenv on any very large
| projects, but I'm surprised to hear about the slowness.
| With the (admittedly small) projects I've tried it, I
| found that it does more or less _just work_.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| As I understand it, the problem is that Pipenv needs to
| resolve the dependency tree to do just about anything;
| however, the dependency tree is dynamic--to determine a
| package's dependencies, you have to download the package
| and run it's setup.py. To get the whole tree, you have to
| recursively download and run each package. So the cost is
| proportional to the size of the dependency tree, so it's
| very plausible that it works fine for the smallest
| projects.
| memco wrote:
| Just a heads up to anyone who hasn't looked recently:
| pipenv has been very actively worked on since earlier
| this year and has had four updates that fix a lot of
| issues. Earlier this year I would have said Poetry is
| better hands down, but after the updates and after using
| poetry and seeing some of its quirks, it's a much closer
| matchup.
| ifore wrote:
| If it wasn't so opinionated it might have been more
| successful.
|
| Just one example: you want your virtualenvs to be created
| in ~/.virtualenvs so that pipenv is a drop-in replacement
| for virtualenvwrapper+pip? Tough luck for you, Kenneth
| Reitz doesn't think that's how it should be done.
|
| At least 3 or 4 times some issue I've wanted resolved I
| found in the issue tracker with the last message "we'll
| have to check with kennethreitz42 whether we're allowed
| to change that" and then silence for a year.
|
| It could still catch up with poetry, but from what I've
| seen there's a fundamental mindset difference in how
| change requests are approached between pipenv and poetry.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Yes, Poetry should be the blessed package manager.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I only want Poetry to become the be-all-end-all of
| package managers if it turns out that Python really is
| never going to fix the core problems that have engendered
| so many of the hacks upon which Poetry (and its
| competitors) is precariously balanced. Pyenv and venv,
| for example.
| bshanks wrote:
| If you were doing a green field redesign, how would you
| want Python to fix the core problems?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Yes, Poetry should be the blessed package manager.
|
| Last time I tried to use poetry (and this is why it was
| the last time I tried to use poetry), it ignored global
| pip settings and had no documented mechanism for its own
| settings (I believe poetry uses its own implementation of
| or captive install of pip) which made it completely
| unusable in a corporate environment with annoying SSL
| interception issues to work around where pip + venv
| worked.
|
| Poetry is a much smoother experience when it works,
| though.
| croh wrote:
| > People keep saying that about every new solution. But
| then another one comes along that's even better-er, and
| the previous one peters out.
|
| I think this is happening these days frequently. People
| try to cover all use cases and then end up in biting more
| than they can chew. It won't work that way. Good set of
| MINIMALS, is easy to maintain, sustain and extend.
| bengalister wrote:
| I like the way npm does. It has a cache of all downloaded
| versions and it tries to flatten the dependencies when
| possible. If there are incompatible versions they remain deep
| in the dependency hierarchy.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Npm has so many woes though. Love the idea but the
| execution leaves much to be desired.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Like what?
| lootsauce wrote:
| Can you go deeper on this, honestly interested. I use NPM
| all the time have not run into too many issues.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I think in general Python's biggest challenge is that it
| doesn't scale well. This is an agglomeration of issues around
| the same theme: bad packaging when there's a lot of cross-
| cutting dependencies, slow performance, no concurrency,
| typing as second-class citizens, etc. All of that is barely
| noticeable when you're just getting started on a small
| experimental project, but incredibly painful in large
| production systems.
|
| I strongly suspect that devs' satisfaction with Python is
| strongly correlated with the size of the codebase they're
| working on. Generally people using Python for one-off
| projects or self-contained tools tend to be pretty happy.
| People stuck in sprawling enterprise codebases, with
| O(million) lines of code to wrangle, seem almost universally
| miserable with the language.
|
| What I've observed a lot is that many startups or greenfield
| projects start with Python to get an MVP out the door as fast
| as possible. Then as the scope of the software expands they
| feel increasingly bogged down and trapped in the language.
| talolard wrote:
| This described is perfectly
| d0mine wrote:
| Have you ever seen O(million) lines enterprise codebase
| that didn't suck?
| lrem wrote:
| I've worked on several separate projects of that size in
| C++ and Go. None of them seemed to achieve a similar mess
| as Python codebases with one or two dozen thousand lines
| seem to. OTOH, all the typing developments in Python
| should have helped? I don't have that much experience
| with them in enterprise setting.
| commonturtle wrote:
| I've worked with an O(100k) line code base in Python that
| was pure torture. Honestly, I was so desperate for
| static-typing by the end that I would have preferred if
| it was all written in C++.
|
| Large codebases are really hard reason about without
| types. I'm glad we now have projects like Pyre that are
| trying to bring typing to Python.
| chii wrote:
| There's some confounding issues that are often confused
| together tho.
|
| large python code bases _could_ be written with well
| modularized, clean separation of concerns and
| composability. Or it could be written in spaghetti.
|
| Using types _could_ help a code base from becoming
| spaghetti, but it's not the only way. I think the
| understandability and maintainability of a code base has
| more to do with the person writing it than the
| availability of a type system tbh.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> desperate for static-typing _
|
| Can you explain why? I honestly don't know, because my
| experience with C++ was during school ~20 years ago, and
| since then professionally I've used mostly python in
| relatively small codebases where it's all my own code
| (mostly for data processing/analysis). Thanks!
|
| (Although I did have to write some C code to glue
| together data in a _very_ old legacy system that didn 't
| support C++, much less python. It took a lot more effort
| to do something simple, but it was also strangely a
| _really_ rewarding experience. Kind of similar to feeling
| when I work with assembly on hobby projects)
| johntb86 wrote:
| The main problem with duck-typing like python has is the
| lack of consistency between different objects that code
| has to work on. Different callers may pass objects with
| different sets of methods into a function and expect it
| to work. You run into the case where the object that was
| passed in is one with subtly-mismatched behavior from
| what your method expects, but you don't know who created
| it - it was probably stored as a member variable by
| something 10 callstack levels and 5 classes distant from
| what you're currently working on.
|
| Static typing prevents that by telling you early where
| the mismatch is happening - some method calls into
| another with a variable of the wrong type, and that's
| where the bug is. It also allows tooling to look up the
| types of variables and quickly get information about
| their properties.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Got it, that makes sense. It also makes sense why I've
| not much been bothered by it in python since my relative
| small code bases don't have that many layers of
| abstraction laid on top of each other.
| MR4D wrote:
| LOL!!
|
| Or even worse - could you imagine how many lines that
| would be in C++ ?
|
| Yowza!
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| n!
| zo1 wrote:
| I have - and it's not that bad. The key is you have to
| have someone coordinating and driving a shared vision for
| the codebase and patterns. But it's hard to find people
| with that sort of passion and drive to follow-through as
| it's a multi-year endeavor with politics all over.
|
| Otherwise its a thousand implementations of the same
| 100-line piece of code interspersed everywhere.
| ineedasername wrote:
| It seems like quality code management gets passed over by
| (bad) management because it looks like it doesn't
| directly move the project forward.
|
| Which is strange because those same managers may be full
| adherents to micro tasking projects in a project
| management system whose purpose is basically to do for
| the project what code management does for the code
| itself.
|
| In my workplace, we've recently had leadership that
| appreciates these things, and the difference is night &
| day. Simple requests from "stakeholders" (I hate that
| term) are often filled in days, or same day, instead of
| weeks. I think it helps tremendously that the primary
| manager is also a coder herself, and still codes ~25% of
| her job.
| gordaco wrote:
| This is surely anecdotic and very subjective, but I have
| (in Java and in C++; IIRC the exact versions were Java 7
| and C++03), and the level of pain was lower than with a
| Python code base that was about one order of magnitude
| smaller. In the case of C++, the pain was mostly
| asociated with an ancient build system we used; the code
| itself was relatively manageable. There was almost zero
| template code, and maybe that helped (although in other
| occasions I've worked with smaller C++03 codebases that
| relied heavily on templates and I didn't find them that
| bad).
|
| Not all codebases are equal and maybe I was lucky, but in
| my experience, using dynamic languages (or, to be exact,
| any language where the compiler doesn't nag you when
| there is a potential problem) doesn't scale well.
| [deleted]
| hobby-coder-guy wrote:
| > O(million)
|
| What does this mean?
| adamc wrote:
| At O(million), the problem wrangling it has more to do with
| how well its architected and written than it being Python.
| Python is at least easy to read. Its major deficiency is
| the lack of annotation of parameters, and that's something
| that could now be fixed... but it isn't going to be fixed
| in that much historical code.
|
| It you are trying to get _performance_ out of it (which
| doesn 't really hinge on whether it's a million lines of
| code), then Python might be the wrong choice. But you can
| always write it in Rust or C and give Python an API to the
| functionality.
|
| I agree that packaging is a mess. Fixing that mess with
| modularization in Java took a long time, and most other
| languages have that problem, too.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> People stuck in sprawling enterprise codebases, with
| O(million) lines of code to wrangle, seem almost
| universally miserable with the language._
|
| This seems to be the case with most languages, especially
| if good code control isn't practiced, and unfortunately
| that's not uncommon.
| Guthur wrote:
| And how much of those problems are an artefact of moving
| fast and getting things down.
|
| I've seen the exact same scenario with other languages. The
| problem is that in a start up environment you are likely
| adding amd retiring more "features" at a speed that layers
| so much complexity that you can no longer reason about what
| business rules are actually valid any more.
| EsotericAlgo wrote:
| I think that's part of it. There is a convention over
| configuration issue as well. A language like Go forces
| some patterns like package management and formatting
| unless you actively try to subvert it.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if many of these issues are self-
| selecting in the language communities as well.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Very much agree. I oversee a relatively small python
| codebase, but getting good quality, safe code out of the
| developers in a controlled way is really hard - there are
| so many ways in which the language just doesn't have enough
| power to serve the needs of more complex apps. We have
| massive amounts of linting, type hinting, code reviews
| spotting obvious errors that would be just invalid code in
| other languages.
|
| It's like getting on a roller coaster without a seat belt
| or a guard rail. It's fun at first, and you will make it
| around the first few bends OK ... then get ready ...
|
| Of course, with enormous discipline, skill and effort you
| can overcome all this. But it just leaves the question -
| really, is this the best tool for the job in the end?
| aserafini wrote:
| No concurrency? asyncio is great for I/O bound network
| stuff!
| colonwqbang wrote:
| "No parallelism" is probably what was meant.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > "No parallelism" is probably what was meant.
|
| Which is still wrong, of course, but "no in-process (or
| in-single-runtime-instance) parallelism" would be
| correct, as would "forking inconvenient parallelism".
| jnwatson wrote:
| I work on Python every day on a reasonably large code base
| and have none of the issues you're talking about. I'm 10x
| more productive than similar C or Java projects.
|
| Dependency management is about as easy as it is going to
| get. We have problems with our dependencies breaking stuff,
| but who doesn't?
|
| People talk as if packaging is a solved problem. It isn't
| in any language. And then they complain that Python
| packaging changes too much. That's because folks are
| iterating on a hard problem.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Do you handle deployment of this Python application? For
| me, that's where the pain points arise. I love writing
| Python, but deploying it does not spark joy at all, at
| all.
| d0mine wrote:
| Here's some of the ways to deploy Python code:
|
| - `curl -L https://app.example.com/install | sh` that
| downloads installer and runs for instance: apt/yum
| install <your-package>
|
| - in CI environment on a VM: `git checkout` & `pipenv
| install --deploy`
|
| - `pipx install glances` on a home computer
|
| - just `pip install` e.g., in a docker container
| [possibly in a virtualenv]. For pure Python packages, it
| can work even in Pythonista for iOS (iphone/ipad)
|
| - just copy a python module/archive (PyInstaller and the
| like)
|
| - give a link to a web app (deployed somewhere via e.g.,
| git push)
|
| - for education: there are python in the browser options
| e.g., brython, repl.it, trinket.io, pythontutor.com
|
| - just write a snippet in my favourite editor for
| literate devops tasks/research (jupyter-emacs + tramp +
| Org Babel) or give a link to a Jupyter notebook
|
| - a useful work can be done even in a REPL (e.g., Python
| as a powerful calculator)
| erjiang wrote:
| Curious to know what issues you have with deploying
| Python codebases. Out of all of the minor and major
| gripes I have with Python, deployment is not one of them.
| tetha wrote:
| To me, python deployments are painless, as long as you
| can stick to pure dependencies and possibly wheels.
|
| Once a pip install needs to start compiling C, things do
| go way south very quickly. At that point you can install
| the union of all common C development tools, kernel
| headers and prepare for hours of header hunting.
|
| I've done that too much to like python anymore.
| wenc wrote:
| I use Anaconda exclusively and deployments (with virtual
| environments) have been fairly ok.
|
| That said, I do run into trouble when I have a dependency
| that requires compilation on Windows (i.e. like the
| popular _turbodbc_ ) because say, a wheel isn't available
| for a particular Python version. Any time a compilation
| is needed, it's a headache. Windows machines don't come
| with compilers, so one has to download and install a
| multigigabyte Visual Studio Build Essentials package just
| to compile. Sometimes the compilation fails for various
| reasons.
|
| Require gcc compilation is headache for installing
| dependencies inside Docker containers too -- you have to
| install gcc in order to install Python dependencies and
| then remove gcc after.
|
| I think requiring local compilation (instead of just
| delivering the binary) is a UNIX-mindset that is holding
| back many packaging solutions. I think a lot of pain
| would be alleviated if we could somehow mandate
| centralized wheel creation for all Python versions,
| otherwise the package manager marks a package as broken
| or unavailable and defaults to the last available wheel.
|
| Also if only we applied some standards like R's CRAN repo
| does -- ie. if it doesn't pass error checks or doesn't
| build on certain architectures (institute a centralized
| CI/CD build pipeline in the package repo), it doesn't get
| published -- the Python packaging experience would be
| much improved.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| "devop" here
|
| > doesn't scale well.
|
| Nothing scales well. scaling requires lots of effort. It
| doesn't matter what language you use, you'll rapidly find
| all its pain points.
|
| > bad packaging when there's a lot of cross-cutting
| dependencies
|
| Much as I hate it, docker solves this. Failing that poetry
| or if you must venv. (if you're being "clever" statically
| compile everything and ship the whole environment,
| including the interpreter) its packaging is a joy compared
| to node. Even better, enforce standard environments, which
| stops all of this. One version of everything. you want to
| change it? best upgrade it for everyone else.
|
| > slow performance
|
| Meh, again depends on your use case. If you're really into
| performance then dump out to C/C++ and pybind it. fronting
| performance critical code in python is a fairly decent way
| to allow non specialists handle and interface performance
| critical code. Its far cheaper to staff it that way too.
| standard python programmers are cheaper than performance
| experts.
|
| If we are being realistic, most of the time 80% of python
| programs are spend waiting on network.
|
| Granted, python is not overly fast, but then most of the
| time your bottleneck is the developer not the language.
|
| > no concurrency
|
| Yes, this is a pain. I would really like some non GIL based
| threading. However its not really been that much of a
| problem. multiprocessing Queues are useful here, if
| limited. Failing that, make more processes and use an rpc
| system.
|
| > typing as second-class citizens
|
| The annotation is under developed. being reliant on
| dataclass libraries to enforce typing is a bit poop.
|
| > People stuck in sprawling enterprise codebases, with
| O(million) lines of code to wrangle, seem almost
| universally miserable with the language.
|
| I work with a _massive_ monorepo. Python isn't the problem,
| its programmer being "clever" or making needless
| abstractions of abstractions. None of that is python's
| issues, its egotistical programmer not wanting to read
| other people's (un documented) code. And not wanting to
| spend time make other people's code better.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _its programmer being "clever"_
|
| When I have to revisit old code I've written, I
| occasionally encounter my "cleverness" at the time. I
| always hate that past version of me. I think I've
| _mostly_ learned my lesson. I guess I 'll know in a few
| years.
| rovr138 wrote:
| >Nothing scales well. scaling requires lots of effort. It
| doesn't matter what language you use, you'll rapidly find
| all its pain points.
|
| This is very important. A lot of people think that just
| using go or rust or whatever other language is new fixes
| all of this. But with a big enough project, you'll find
| all the issues. It's just a matter of time.
| sanderjd wrote:
| This is _somewhat_ true - scaling is hard no matter what
| - but some things scale much better than others. I have
| been miserable working with ruby on rails codebases that
| are much smaller than java codebases I have been content
| working on. This is despite personally enjoying the ruby
| language _far_ more than the java language.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| Do not miss that one will find all of the _language 's_
| pain points. I'd wager that a dynamically typed languages
| such as Python has quit a few more pain points at scale
| than a more principled language such as OCaml.
|
| I love Python's bignum arithmetic when I write small
| prototypes for public key cryptography. I love Python's
| extensive standard library when I'm scrapping a couple
| web pages for easier local reading. But I would never
| willingly chose it for anything bigger than a few hundred
| lines. I'm simply not capable of dealing with large
| dynamically typed programs.
|
| Now if people try Rust or OCaml with the mentality of an
| early startup's Lisp developer, they're going to get hurt
| right away ("fighting the language" and "pleasing the
| compiler" is neither pleasing nor productive), and
| they're going to get hurt in the long run (once you've
| worked around the language annoying checks, you won't
| reap as much benefits).
|
| If you'll allow the caricature, don't force Coq down Alan
| Kay's throat, and don't torture Edsger Dijkstra with TCL.
| nope_42 wrote:
| > Much as I hate it, docker solves this. Failing that
| poetry or if you must venv. (if you're being "clever"
| statically compile everything and ship the whole
| environment, including the interpreter) its packaging is
| a joy compared to node. Even better, enforce standard
| environments, which stops all of this. One version of
| everything. you want to change it? best upgrade it for
| everyone else.
|
| No, docker doesn't solve the fact that some packages just
| won't play nicely together. NPM actually does this better
| than the python ecosystem too since it will still work
| with different versions of the same dependency. You get
| larger bundle sizes but that's better than the
| alternative of it just flat not working.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Conda works well.
|
| Have never used cargo - what can cargo do that conda cannot?
| StreamBright wrote:
| Just work, instead of not working?
| https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/9059
| jevgeni wrote:
| Feature selection, dependency overriding, worspaces, to
| name a few.
| beagle3 wrote:
| conda has "environments" which are isolated from each
| other and can each have specific versions of python and
| dependencies installed in them (and each has their own
| "pip" local installation as well, in case something
| wasn't specifically packaged for conda).
|
| What are those "workspaces" you refer to?
|
| What is "feature selection"?
| sidlls wrote:
| Conda works slightly better than pip, which is a pretty low
| bar. Python package management is probably the absolute
| worst thing about that language.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Still, it worked perfectly for me for Python, and a few
| more things. So I ask - what problems does conda have?
| And which of those does cargo not have?
|
| Alternatively, what does cargo do better than conda if
| they are not feature-for-feature comparable ?
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| This is probably a hard problem, but the dependency graph
| resolution in conda is a thing of nightmares. It is so
| appallingly slow even for relatively menial tasks that
| updating environments becomes an exercise in frustration.
|
| I'm unsure what are the core issues, but in my experience
| cargo was always pretty quick to use and if it fails, it
| fails fast.
|
| Conda on the other hand is slow for the simple cases, and
| if the graph becomes complex it will just churn for 15
| minutes before throwing it's hands in the air and giving
| up with some cryptic error.
|
| I suspect it comes back to the fact that packaging and
| dependency management was thought about upfront for Rust
| and the whole ecosystem was built well from the get go?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I've been meaning to write a blog post on this topic.
| That is, on the various speeds of various package
| managers. I don't know a ton about Conda, but when I was
| looking into Poetry, one of the core issues is:
| https://python-poetry.org/docs/faq/#why-is-the-
| dependency-re...
|
| > This is due to the fact that not all libraries on PyPI
| have properly declared their metadata and, as such, they
| are not available via the PyPI JSON API. At this point,
| Poetry has no choice but downloading the packages and
| inspect them to get the necessary information. This is an
| expensive operation, both in bandwidth and time, which is
| why it seems this is a long process.
|
| Cargo doesn't need to do anything with packages directly
| to do its job; everything it needs is in the index. This
| makes it pretty fast.
| estebank wrote:
| >> This is due to the fact that not all libraries on PyPI
| have properly declared their metadata and, as such, they
| are not available via the PyPI JSON API. At this point,
| Poetry has no choice but downloading the packages and
| inspect them to get the necessary information. This is an
| expensive operation, both in bandwidth and time, which is
| why it seems this is a long process.
|
| This sounds like something that could be done server
| side, either by PyPI or another entity and expose it
| through a new API endpoint, instead of doing it on every
| Python developer's machine.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The core issue is that setup.py can be non-deterministic,
| so them doing it server side may not give the right
| results.
|
| https://dustingram.com/articles/2018/03/05/why-pypi-
| doesnt-k...
| stevesimmons wrote:
| conda taking 15+ mins to resolve dependencies is by far
| its biggest weakness.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| If it doesn't fail to "solve the environment" after 30
| minutes that's already a win.
| sidlls wrote:
| In addition to the other replies, one I've encountered is
| the case where conda doesn't provide a build for a
| package (thus, one must use pip or something else to
| manage that dependency) causing weird issues with respect
| to maintenance and updates.
|
| The two worst are in the other comments: ensuring sync'd
| dependencies across multiple environments and developers,
| and the horrendous resolution times leading to a useless
| error message when failures occur.
| baq wrote:
| conda can manage python versions itself as if it was
| another package.
|
| https://docs.conda.io/projects/conda/en/latest/user-
| guide/ta...
|
| i've never used it particular feature, but then i'm using
| python since 1.5 and i'm just used to it being a bit
| behind the times. stockholm syndrome, you might say,
| especially after trying out rust and seeing the work of
| art cargo is.
| jshen wrote:
| How do you ensure a team of 30 developers are all using
| the same version of python and all of the dependencies of
| your project with conda? How do you distinguish prod
| dependencies from dev dependencies? How do you update and
| manage transitive dependencies?
|
| There are more, but those are the big three.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Conda manages Python itself as one of the dependencies -
| so that's not actually a problem.
|
| I used conda to manage 2.6, 2.7 and 3.3 side by side, a d
| that was fine. I never locked the patch version (e.g.
| 2.7.3 vs 2.7.5) though that is definitely possible.
|
| It apparently requires a specific workflow - explicitly
| editing the requirements.txt file, rather than freezing
| it - which is not harder and which I was doing since day
| 1 but is apparently uncommon.
|
| (And it worked well across a few tens of machines, some
| running windows and some running Linux, with a mix of os
| versions and distributions. So I know it worked well
| already in 2013, and I'm sure it works better now).
|
| Speed is not good, but I never had it take more than a
| minute for anything. Some people here are reporting 15
| minutes resolution times - that is a real problem.
| vmchale wrote:
| > An official package manager with great dependency
| resolution would be fantastic.
|
| Need something like cabal. And a package index.
| Arkanosis wrote:
| Cargo for Python... that's pretty much Poetry.
|
| I was already in love with Python, but Poetry has definitely
| made me a much happier Python developer.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Package management and performance. Microsoft has done an
| impressive job of making software development better lately,
| and if any community needs it, it's Python. Python has a lot
| of potential, but it's sorely hampered by poor package
| management and performance, which are ultimately both
| symptoms of its commitment to exposing the entire CPython
| interpreter as a stable public interface. If the Python
| leadership were willing to commit to a narrower interface
| that met the goals of the c-extension community and also
| allowed Python to improve with respect to performance and
| package management (and I think this is very possible, hpy
| gets us close afaict), then we could have the best of both
| worlds, and I'm optimistic that Microsoft could provide this
| leadership.
| zo1 wrote:
| What poor performance?
|
| At this point, this criticism has become a "thing" that no
| one really expands on or enumerates as if it's a given.
| It's not a given, and at the very least is nuanced and
| complicated.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but
| Python itself is quite slow (100-1000X slower than Go or
| Java) and it's only "fast" when it's dispatching to C or
| Rust or FORTRAN, and even then (to your point about
| nuance) these optimizations are only feasible _sometimes_
| ; namely, when the cost of serializing is lower than the
| efficiencies gained by the optimizations available in the
| target language. This is all pretty widely discussed,
| including here on this very forum.
|
| No doubt that Python is sometimes fast enough (e.g.,
| vanilla CRUD apps that do all of the heavy lifting in
| Postgres), but sometimes it's not and you're left with
| really crumby optimization options. And since we rarely
| can know with certainty on the outset of a project
| whether or not the bottlenecks will be amenable to the
| optimizations afforded by Python, it's a dangerous game.
| I would even go so far as to say that other languages
| have become quite good at many of the things that Python
| is good at (namely pace of development) while being much
| better at the things that it's not good at (performance,
| package management, etc), so I actually wouldn't
| recommend starting new projects in Python except for
| certain niches, like scientific computing (and who knows
| if Python will even retain its dominance there).
| tomrod wrote:
| I jumped down the black hole of pip + geo packages this week.
| Your comments are absolutely spot onm
| pmontra wrote:
| At the top of my wish list there is a deployment tool for web
| applications like capistrano / mina for Ruby. I ended up
| writing my own for the project of a customer. It's been running
| for a few years now.
|
| Same customer, another project, I'm experimenting with a
| deployment system based on git format-patch. It copies the
| patches on the server (we have only one server) and applies
| them with patch. Then restart the web app.
|
| It's fun to learn the internals by rewriting the tooling but a
| good tooling to start with would be better.
| [deleted]
| simonw wrote:
| By far the biggest challenge for the Python ecosystem at the
| moment is how difficult it is for new users to get started, and
| how difficult it is for non-programmers to install tools written
| in Python.
|
| I'd be thrilled if Guido and Microsoft could help make this
| better!
| Aperocky wrote:
| Seriously? python is the easiest language to get started imo,
| absolute minimum requirements to get a script off.
|
| If non-programmers don't even want to run a few command in
| terminal like pip, why do they even want to start with python?
| The whole mentality is wrong.
| bredren wrote:
| I think maybe the bar is low for new to development
| experience across all fronts.
| pvitz wrote:
| Miguel de Icaza: "The developer division at Microsoft now employs
| the language designers and contributors to Python, Java,
| JavaScript, Typescript, F# C#, C++.
|
| We just need some PHP, Rust and Swift magic to complete the
| picture."
| daxfohl wrote:
| There was also that dude who created GW-BASIC.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| He doesn't work for them anymore.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Yeah I heard he's cleaning toilets in Africa now. I guess
| rumors about Microsoft's low TC are true.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Can we skip PHP?
| tored wrote:
| No, what Microsoft should do is a WinRT language projection
| for PHP. Can you imagine the epicness?
| oaiey wrote:
| Considering that php runtime in 2020 is quite speedy (see
| swoole) a WinRT binding (good lib space) is not the worst
| combination. Just the syntax :)
| reader_mode wrote:
| Facebook has that covered
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Wait, who matches each?
| aquilaFiera wrote:
| Well, the TypeScript and .NET organizations live within the
| Developer Division, and now we have Guido so there's Python.
| We also have fairly substantial dev tooling teams for C++ and
| Java so I imagine some of the contributors are there. We also
| have Node.js contributors as well as Electron (due to VS
| Code). Source: I work in DevDiv as well.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Any ideas on Perl?
| aquilaFiera wrote:
| Nope, I don't know of anyone working on Perl stuff in
| DevDiv but it's a big division.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Great idea to apply the principles of competition inside
| Microsoft:
|
| After a few years of competition, they can just shut down the
| teams working with the least effective languages.
|
| Using this methodology, Microsoft will end up using the best
| tools for the job. And they can accept people from any
| subculture for a few years while the experiment is going on!
|
| This is the "developers developers develop" we have all been
| waiting for!
| l0b0 wrote:
| And their contributions belong to Microsoft, whose corporate
| leadership then has tremendous power to influence the licensing
| and pricing of future languages.
| apozem wrote:
| My impression of Microsoft's plan for the forseeable future,
| on the developer side, is to capture value from open source
| projects with cloud hosting, GitHub enterprise billing and
| the like.
|
| They want a golden path from their developer-facing tools
| (TypeScript, VS Code, C#) to their monthly services (GitHub,
| Azure, Teams). They're going to make all of that work
| together as well as they can so you won't want to look
| elsewhere.
|
| Frankly, it's ingenious. If it works, the hard-to-monetize
| value of open-source projects like TypeScript and VS Code
| will be captured in your monthly Azure bill.
| flowerlad wrote:
| In that list, TypeScript, C# were invented by Anders Hejlsberg
| who works for Microsoft. Python by Guido who also now works for
| Microsoft. F# was invented at Microsoft.
|
| But as far as Java, JavaScript and C++, I am not who the
| luminaries are, that work at Microsoft. James Gosling and
| Stroustrup don't work for Microsoft.
| nojvek wrote:
| There's many folks from the Typescript team who sit on the
| TC39 committee that are responsible for moving state of
| Javascript (Ecmascript) forward.
|
| Now that Microsoft Edge is powered by Chromium, there are
| many folks that also contribute/ have say in development of
| chromium and nodejs.
|
| This is just a rumour, but Microsoft aggressively hired
| Chromium devs from Google.
|
| Basically Microsoft wants to build the best tooling for the
| most popular languages. They have Github + VSCode. Who knows
| they may also acquire stackoverflow. It's in their realm.
| groos wrote:
| Herb Sutter, C++ ISO committee chair works for Microsoft, so
| while not the language inventor, someone pretty important in
| the community.
| kamyarg wrote:
| They don't claim having inventors of the language, but
| language designers and contributors.
|
| For example Brett Cannon is also at MSFT, he is a core
| developer and member of steering council for Python, he also
| qualifies along Guido for this claim in Python.
| oaiey wrote:
| Mozilla recent layoff could be th prelude for that on Rust. And
| is not the guy behind Swift and LLVM - I forgot his name -
| hopping around anyway :). And Zeev and Andi from PHP are also
| on the loose last time I read something. So :)
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Chris Lattner?
| daxfohl wrote:
| And Delphi, VB, erm J#.
|
| Who is next? Ryan Dahl? Rob Pike? Larry Wall? Rich Hickey? DHH?
| [deleted]
| xtreak29 wrote:
| Larry Wall is at Craigslist
| raverbashing wrote:
| Seems appropriate
|
| Craigslist is still web 1.0 no?
| flubert wrote:
| Simon Peyton Jones also work for Microsoft, so maybe add
| Haskell to the list.
| totalperspectiv wrote:
| And the Pony guy
| huhtenberg wrote:
| No picture is complete without Urban Muller in it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| So they can own package management on Amiga OS, too?
| mikece wrote:
| Is he being hired as a Distinguished Fellow on par with Miguel de
| Icaza or Anders?
| 1-6 wrote:
| Update IronPython!!!
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Am I the only person here that finds this somewhat terrifying?
| medecau wrote:
| The internet has a lot of people - you're probably not the only
| one scared.
|
| Care to explain what's worrying you though?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| EEE, github, windows 10, there's a lot of reasons to suspect
| that when Microsoft becomes directly involved in something it
| starts to become less useful to the user.
| azhenley wrote:
| I'm excited to see what kind of teams they get going that focus
| on Python tools!
| davidkell wrote:
| Top of my wish list would be a python <-> VSCode experience at
| the typescript level of quality.
|
| Interesting that mypy is a Dropbox (GvR's previous gig) whereas
| Microsoft has a competitor python type checker, pyright [0].
| Anyone have experience with it?
|
| [0] https://github.com/microsoft/pyright
| berekuk wrote:
| Microsoft is betting on pylance for VSCode instead of pyright,
| though, and pylance is not open-source [0].
|
| I wonder if Guido will be ok with that. For me pylance looks
| like the biggest evidence that embrace-extend-extingish mindset
| is still alive in Microsoft, unfortunately.
|
| [0] https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Microsoft is betting on pylance for VSCode instead of
| pyright
|
| Not really "instead of", since pyright is the typing engine
| for pylance.
| sime2009 wrote:
| It is hard to tell how Pyright and Mypy compare head to head.
| I've been using Pyright for quite a long time and have seen the
| huge leaps forward it has made. The experience feels a lot like
| how I remember PyCharm from a few years ago. I would really
| miss it if it were gone.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Why not use Pycharm?
| falcor84 wrote:
| Well, one good reason is that unlike VS Code, Pycharm is not
| open source.
| criddell wrote:
| How often have you ever needed the source code for your
| text editor?
| duckerude wrote:
| The community edition is (Apache 2):
| https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-
| community/tree/master/...
| falcor84 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. This is really cool. And I'm slightly
| surprised that Pycharm uses the exact same codebase as
| IntelliJ, just with a different run configuration [0]. It
| makes perfect sense of course, but I was pleasantly
| surprised.
|
| [0] `To run PyCharm Community Edition, please use the
| provided run configuration "PyCharm Community Edition"`
| bredren wrote:
| This is an unpopular opinion around here, and I use pycharm
| almost every day, but I think the future is vscode.
|
| Reason is MS doesn't need to make money on the tool, because
| it has a halo of services it can sell in and offer perfect
| integrations for.
|
| In addition, MS has GitHub and thus privledged ability to
| learn from new public code as it is pushed.
|
| AI-based code completion offered by kite and tabnine is
| totally being slept on right now, and MS has the resources to
| offer a very refined and constantly improving take on this
| massive dev services opportunity.
|
| Jetbrains has said it has a long term project focused on this
| but as of now there is nothing.
|
| I am not suggesting abandoning Pycharm any time soon but it
| is going to take a bigger company than jetbrains to keep
| pycharm in the race against vscode.
| zerr wrote:
| I wonder about such successful but dedicated to a single project
| persons - don't they have a FOMO?
| binarymax wrote:
| FOMO on what? Python makes more of an impact on the world than
| most people would even dream of for their projects. The
| products that use the language cover the entire spectrum of
| digital technology...
| zerr wrote:
| Yes, it is a very popular glue scripting language (to
| oversimplify a bit :)) but that's not the point, I mean that
| Guido himself is not involved in all of that spectrum
| directly (AFAIK).
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'd say it's really exciting to stay focused. Plus Python has
| been the hot baby for quite a while so he is not missing out
| anything IMO.
| caturopath wrote:
| Like Mark Zuckerberg?
|
| And Bob Dylan?
|
| Van Rossum is famous for the Python language and language-
| related stuff for Python, but he did stuff in his career before
| inventing it and has done stuff since (for instance, a lot of
| his work at Google was on App Engine).
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Maybe Python will get nice tooling.
| Cherian wrote:
| Watching Microsoft from the 90s adapt and to see Satya get to do
| what he wants is pretty amazing!
| entropy1111 wrote:
| Adopt, adapt, annihilate.
| russtrotter wrote:
| I was thinking the same. I spent many of the formative years of
| my career (late-80's, most of the 90's) HATING microsoft but to
| see them now and all the relatively "open" stuff that they not
| only embrace but can't really extinguish is refreshing. I think
| some of that attitude put Satya in place, but he's run with the
| ball under the same ethos.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| Why is everyone so dense or should I say naive? Microsoft is
| pulling the classic embrace, extinguish card. It is the exact
| same fckng process all over again and you are all falling for
| it. It'll just take a decade or so. Just wait.
| beagle3 wrote:
| They only open that which they have no advantage in.
| Operating system is as closed (and as hostile) as ever, so is
| office and sqlserver. Xbox requires an always on connection.
|
| It is their right, of course. But I don't buy the "new
| Microsoft" ethos.
| xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote:
| Yeah, I love the new Microsoft, especially because of the
| forced telemetry and updates. Not to mention making it
| impossible to create a local user account on Windows 10, unless
| you disconnect from the internet.
|
| UWP is wonderful too.
| tored wrote:
| Paradox of Microsoft's new image is that software development
| & tools has never been better as it is today, but the desktop
| experience is one of the worst in Windows history, the
| opposite of the old days. Seems that you can't have them
| both.
| burnthrow wrote:
| Yea I love this brave new world where frontend development
| feels like ASP.NET. Love me some TypeScript, shipping
| features quickly was getting old. Say it with me now,
| noImplicitAny! We're Engineers now, thanks Microsoft.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It's not impossible to create a local account without
| disconnecting from the Internet.
| xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote:
| Since Windows 10 1903 it's impossible, at least in the Home
| version.
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/442609/confirmed-
| windows-10-setup-...
| gitweb wrote:
| Microsoft should really improve their unattended process.
| This is where Linux really outshines Windows. I can
| configure a Linux installer with all my favorite software
| integrated, user accounts, configurations, etc--but with
| Windows I essentially have to install Windows, install my
| apps (leaving tons of randomly scattered files and
| registry entries all over the system), and then sysprep
| the WIM.
|
| The unattended setup on Windows is very confusing, there
| are like 3 different ways and 6 steps to configure, and
| the tools are mostly designed with GUI in mind. Could you
| imagine being able to configure, install drivers and apps
| using a single YAML file for Windows?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I when's through creating and deploying a Windows image
| last year. It's a really painful and convoluted process
| and the tools don't help much.
| memling wrote:
| Can confirm; recently configured a Surface tablet for
| family, and no workarounds were possible.
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| Last time I tried (4 months ago) you still could create a
| local account while connected to the internet.
|
| They're making it more obscure, though
| jnwatson wrote:
| For Win 10 Home, the only way is to create a temporary
| Microsoft-connected account to install, then create a local
| account after installing, then delete the first account.
| diarrhea wrote:
| Just did so successfully two weeks ago, Win10 Pro on T480s,
| Version 2004 or 20H2, can't remember. The latest of what
| the Media Creation Tool gave me, anyway. Others said Win10
| Home does not work anymore.
|
| Ironically, I installed Win10 coming from Manjaro, which
| even on a T480s (probably one of _the_ laptops to have for
| Linux compatibility) broke after every other update, so
| like twice a day. On the other hand, Debian /Ubuntu has
| been too far behind on software versions for me. Both had
| terrible compatibility with my Thunderbolt 3 dock.
| Hopefully in the future, we will meet again!
|
| Until then, it is ridiculous how much more Win10 Just
| Works.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I'm surprised you didn't try one of the more mainstream
| stable-but-current distros, like Fedora or openSUSE.
| ayewo wrote:
| Perhaps they didn't try due to the difference in package
| management?
|
| Fedora/openSuSE are RPM-based distros while Ubuntu uses
| Debian packages.
| amanzi wrote:
| "Not to mention making it impossible to create a local user
| account on Windows 10, unless you disconnect from the
| internet." This is false. I've done this a couple of times
| recently on Windows 10 and it's no problem at all - just
| requires clicking a link on the create user account page. In
| fact, I always prefer to create a local account first and
| then tie my MS account to it afterwards.
| patagurbon wrote:
| I've created local users several times. It's not super clear
| I agree, but definitely doable in the last month or so.
| bluedino wrote:
| Ironically they are still the same old Microsoft in most ways.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Win10 is still user hostile. A recent update on a computer I
| support for an older family member installed an uninstallable
| Edge, hijacked the PDF association, and with the first PDF
| opened through edge, used credentials stored in Office to log
| in to Microsoft.com "for convenience" without asking.
|
| The monopolistic DNA still runs strong in Microsoft. They are
| behaving nicely only where they have no advantage.
|
| I don't buy the "new Microsoft", not one bit.
| phkahler wrote:
| Completely agree. Just started a new job and was issued a new
| laptop with the latest MS stuff. Everything wants to be cloud
| based. The browser regularly has rendering glitches when
| scrolling a pdf. Little ads pop up for no apparent reason.
| Installed apps are just temporary unless you pay. It feels
| like a desktop designed by Facebook.
|
| Having said that, aside from the pdf glitch I'd say it works
| very smoothly, exactly the way they intended.
| jug wrote:
| I find it frustrating because it looks like there are two
| sides of Microsoft. One helming Windows 10 and another doing
| the impressive Visual Studio Code, PowerShell Core, .NET Core
| work etc. where they go like "Hey maybe we should build a
| Rust projection for WinRT, OK here you go!"
|
| Windows 10 _should_ have been so much more and so much easier
| for Microsoft to rapidly evolve in a more beautiful fashion.
| But I guess there 's just so much enforced backwards
| compatibility within it that their hands are almost tied
| behind their backs. Everything is ran in the same system on
| equal footing, from Windows XP era stuff to whatever the
| latest "app" trends are. Unsurprisingly it becomes a mess.
|
| Windows 10X looked to be the right way forward where they
| _finally_ decide to just run everything Win32 in light weight
| containers to shed all that dead weight for a more
| maintainable system, but it 's sure taking a while to see
| anything and I hear the ARM edition that will be essential
| isn't going all too well. We're looking at a completely
| different, really troublesome, performance in 10X for x86 on
| ARM than macOS Big Sur and Rosetta 2 on Apple M1 that is
| already about to ship/shipping.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I mean who's supposed to be the "good guy" then, Apple?
| beagle3 wrote:
| Apple is the "least bad" guy at the moment. They are not
| "good". But all the big guys are bad to some extent. (And
| since you brought them up - Apple's cloud push is bad,
| though not remotely as bad as Microsoft's cloud push)
|
| I am not saying Microsoft is exceptionally bad in any way.
| I am just saying the "new, good Microsoft" is a mirage.
| They are as bad as they had ever been, except they have
| been beaten into submission in some sectors, so they behave
| in those.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Apple is the worst with their initiative to make their
| devices irrepairable, monopolistic practices on iOS and
| extracting value out of their target audience ruthlessly.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Apple does not have a monopoly - Android outsells them
| significantly in just about every market. Microsoft still
| has a PC monopoly. That makes a huge difference.
|
| And yes, Apple making their device impossible to repair
| is evil, but their value extraction is opt-in (buy buying
| into their ecosystem) because they are not a monopoly.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| What we have is an unregulated duopoly and Google and
| Apple are filling their boots.
| suprfnk wrote:
| And Apple is the best (of those companies) when it comes
| to privacy and not spying on your every single digital
| move.
| frankish wrote:
| IMO decentralization and competition are the only way to
| get the bad actors to occasionally do good.
| boogies wrote:
| The FSF.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Why does there have to be a "good guy"? Can't there just be
| a bunch of different bad guys?
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Why does there have to be a "good guy"? Can't there
| just be a bunch of different bad guys?_
|
| Narrative tropes demand that there be a protagonist, so
| one of the bad guys must be cast as an anti-hero, at the
| very least.
|
| Huh. I just realized that to many of his supporters,
| Trump is an anti-hero. No wonder pointing out his flaws
| doesn't work.
| StreamBright wrote:
| There are different divisions in Microsoft and these do
| different things. The division gave us F# (that I am
| eternally grateful for) is not the same that gave us Windows
| (that I am never going to forgive). These things can coexist.
| beagle3 wrote:
| You could say that about a democratic country. But
| Microsoft, like any corporation, is a dictatorship.
|
| F# is public relations and research - so you get to enjoy
| the fruits. But the day it gains any strategic importance,
| it will be used and abused for that purpose.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Honestly, I cut them some slack on the MS account integration
| (you log in to MS on one app and you're logged in everywhere)
| because Google and Apple both established it as good practice
| on their mobile OSes. In this case, MS was the _last_ one to
| the party to make Windows integrate with their cloud accounts
| like that.
|
| My biggest problems with Win10 are far more mundane - the
| incomplete/buggy touch interface, the explorer bugs that are
| old enough to drink, the new signed-executable security model
| that is very OSS-hostile (but again, imported from mobile
| OSes). The fact that half the configuration screens are in
| the new Settings system and half are in the old Control
| Panel, where you'll even bounce back and forth to tweak a
| single component.
| canada_dry wrote:
| > Win10 is still user hostile.
|
| Maybe MS could catch the wave of "old-school" versions that
| are all the rage (e.g. WoW, Runescape), and release a Win95
| flavour of Windows that runs on current hardware.
|
| I miss the "old-school" GUI conventions and simplicity of -
| gulp - 25 years ago.
| pinewurst wrote:
| I see it differently. The awful W10 stuff to me is a
| byproduct of adopting the FAANG PM crap - everything's an A/B
| test, everything's about driving engagement (even if they
| drive it with a nailgun into your skull :). It is a "new
| Microsoft", but the new Microsoft is parity with the existing
| Google and Facebook.
| dryrunes wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this FAANG PM stuff? I am not super
| familiar with it but it seems interesting.
| cjsawyer wrote:
| The acronym is for Facebook Amazon Apple Netflix Google
| ... project management, maybe?
| pinewurst wrote:
| Product Managers and the common philosophies this title
| seems to have adopted at those sorts of places.
| dryrunes wrote:
| I was more wondering what about these philosophies are
| bad.
| pinewurst wrote:
| IMHO when you're strongly incentivized to optimize for
| engagement stats attributable to you, you're pushing
| change for the sake of change combined with the darkest
| of UI patterns to ensure your changes are selected and
| "favored".
| boogies wrote:
| > They are behaving nicely only where they have no advantage.
|
| This. Just look at gaming. Xbox is losing, so they champion
| pro-consumer cross-platform multiplayer. Minecraft is
| popular, so they kill GNU/Linux support with Bedrock Edition.
| Alphaeus wrote:
| Bedrock Edition is primarily targetted at the consoles
| (where running the Java-based Java Edition was difficult).
| Java Edition is still worked on (and runs on Linux) and
| they are trying to achieve parity between the two versions.
| boogies wrote:
| Bedrock Edition was based on the C++ rewrite for Pocket
| Edition and has better performance and crossplay.
| donor20 wrote:
| Yeah, one side is doing great work - the Win10 story still
| sucks a bit / lot.
| patagurbon wrote:
| With them sunsetting IE what's the alternative? Surely there
| should be a browser that cannot be uninstalled right? I agree
| with the rest of your issues, but if Edge is ever to
| completely replace IE it should remain installed no?
| driverdan wrote:
| > Surely there should be a browser that cannot be
| uninstalled right?
|
| No. You should be able to uninstall everything that isn't
| needed for the computer to boot.
| beagle3 wrote:
| First, they haven't sunset IE yet. If the same update
| uninstalled IE, you might have had a point.
|
| Second, putting the icon everywhere _in your face_ is
| monopolistic behaviour. In Europe, for a while, Windows
| came without a browser installed, and let you pick one to
| download upon install. This is the non-monopolist way to
| make sure the user has a usable browser.
|
| Also, that user already had a self-updating Firefox, self-
| updating Chrome, and manually-updating Safari on the same
| machine.
| jrootabega wrote:
| The "new Microsoft" is useful for the time being. Once they
| are positioned to, they'll drop the hammer.
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| I think they're optimizing for a different use-
| case/perspective: > uninstallable Edge Alternative: The
| person has a browser that is auto updated and doesn't need to
| fiddle around
|
| > hijacked the PDF association
|
| Alternative: The person has an in-built PDF viewer without
| scouring the web for "PDF viewer" and downloading malware or
| a sketchy app
|
| > used credentials stored in Office to log in to
| Microsoft.com "for convenience" without asking
|
| Alternative: "Wow it's cool how all my Microsoft things are
| working well together"
|
| I think there's room for grace about the experience of 99% of
| users who don't want infinite customization but something
| that works well with helpful defaults.
| beagle3 wrote:
| No, that person already had a PDF viewer installed, more
| capable than the one built in to edge.
|
| There is no excuse to replacing that on a forced update
| without notification.
|
| Seriously, you can explain anything this way: "all files
| deleted" alternative: "Microsoft just helping you free up
| space" or "the files weren't backed up so they weren't
| important".
|
| Microsoft is squarely in the "monopolistic bad guy" corner
| here.
|
| Edit: Said person also had a self-updating Chrome, self-
| updating Firefox, and manually updating Safari on the same
| machine, for the record.
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| Changing existing defaults is def a no-no. I thought it
| was a fresh install of Windows you were complaining
| about.
| Proven wrote:
| Nice, happy to hear that and great for Python. MS has been great
| for Python.
| progfix wrote:
| They really try to own everything Python related. I fear in 10
| years the only viable way of using Python is on a Windows PC with
| Visual Studio or some other Microsoft owned IDE. You have to be
| logged in with your Microsoft account and everything you type
| will be processed and sent to a Microsoft data center.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Yeah, that's a valid fear since that's how it works today with
| C#, TypeScript, etc.
| mathgenius wrote:
| He should make another language, surely that's a good retirement
| project? But he must call it "monte".
| oaiey wrote:
| Well Anders Heilsberg did exactly that from Pascal to C# (we
| gracefully ignore delphi and j++ in between). And the after C#
| he thought about Types in JavaScript. So, I do not know Guido,
| but with language designers you never know.
| fghorow wrote:
| Guido, IMHO the primary reason Python is great is because you
| have taste. Please insist on keeping that at MS...
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Same for Clojure.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| It's sad, dealing directly with extreme over-engineered
| enterprise Java libraries to compensate for Clojure's lack of
| ecosystem erodes all the attractiveness of the language for
| doing real-world or hobby applications.
|
| OTOH, there is no much benefit today in Clojure over other
| languages for database backed apps, most of what is
| considered good Clojure code is more about the methodology
| than the language per se. The real benefits IMO is when you
| paired it with Datomic avoiding the impedance mismatch in
| data structures, but Datomic is another can of worms.
| URfejk wrote:
| MS is soon going to show him who the boss is ...
| meowface wrote:
| Eh, I don't think so. If they ever do, he can just move on.
| I'm sure there's no shortage of big (or small) employers who
| would love to have him.
| URfejk wrote:
| Yes, but who can pay him as much as MS can?
| jedberg wrote:
| He worked at Google for seven years just after their IPO,
| and then Pre-IPO at Dropbox. It's unlikely that he's
| there for the paycheck.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Google uses a lot of Python and I'm sure they'd be happy
| to have him, for instance
| snazz wrote:
| He already worked at Google from 2005 to 2012, although
| they might be interested in having him back.
| snazz wrote:
| Any of the other FAANGs or unicorns. I doubt that the
| paycheck is his primary motivation, but I could be wrong.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _MS is soon going to show him who the boss is ..._
|
| They let Anders Hejlsberg have free reign over his languages,
| encouraged it in fact.
| URfejk wrote:
| Well, time will tell ...
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Well, time will tell ..._
|
| He joined them in 1996, and has done J++, C# and now
| TypeScript. They seem quite content for him to just keep
| making new languages which they throw all their marketing
| muscle behind.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Someone on the internet: MS management will own him, like
| they do others, he hath been ingested into their belly
|
| Me, some rando MS employee who works on languages: yeah,
| I can actually do pretty much anything that I feel is
| right, at half the level of Guido (if even that) and a
| miniscule amount of clout
| msthrw2020 wrote:
| Chiming in as another rando MS employee who works on
| languages, while I think "ms will own him" is thoroughly
| overly dramatic, I made this account to express honest
| surprise that you feel like you have leeway with little
| clout.
|
| At least in my group our ability to do what we want was
| directly corresponding how connected/influential our
| sponsor was, and absent that, I have almost no ability to
| do what I feel is right, even if I have data backing it
| up, if the powers that be are in opposition.
|
| I don't want to paint this as some universal ms-doing-
| terrible-things statement, just that I don't personally
| feel like I have much freedom to assert philosophy or
| ideology, and I've seen well respected individuals in
| engineering even up to and above principal/partner die on
| comparatively minor hills before which makes me think
| it's not just me.
|
| And while I'm being dangerously candid, this to me seems
| like a prestige hire much like carmack at facebook, and I
| chuckle at the ado being given in both directions in this
| thread. I will be pleasantly surprised if this motivates
| more python support but expect neither good nor bad.
| bmitc wrote:
| Do people really consider Python to have taste? It basically
| ignored Scheme, ML, and Erlang dialects from its creation
| onwards.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| I think it's all about the syntax and less about the
| semantics that still makes it a top 5 language.
|
| Makes you think about how important the syntax for a language
| is.
| ehsankia wrote:
| The fact that Python code is readable like pseudocode is
| most definitely why I like it best, over esoteric languages
| like Perl or Erlang with their non-intuitive use of various
| characters.
|
| To a seasoned programmer it may look obvious, but Python is
| still by far the best language for newcomers, and generally
| people tend to stick much longer to the language they were
| first taught.
| bmitc wrote:
| I am "seasoned", and I find Python not obvious at all.
| It's a confusing language with little gotchas everywhere.
| I find writing code in something like Racket or F# to be
| much easier and more consistent than Python.
| chippy wrote:
| the user said the person who created Python had good taste,
| not that the language they created has it (somehow)
| webmaven wrote:
| _> the user said the person who created Python had good
| taste, not that the language they created has it (somehow)_
|
| I think that saying Guido has taste implies that Python is
| _tasteful_.
| solinent wrote:
| Python 2 was pretty tasteful, simple, usable, the exception
| that proved the rule. I think Python has evolved since.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Do people really consider Python to have taste?_
|
| Yes. Obviously people have different tastes, but many many
| people find Python to be tastefully designed.
|
| _> It basically ignored Scheme, ML, and Erlang dialects from
| its creation onwards._
|
| Those are... all radically different languages from each
| other.
|
| This is like arguing that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
| would be better if it was more like sushi, chocolate, and
| pasta.
| bmitc wrote:
| > Those are... all radically different languages from each
| other.
|
| Not really, but that wasn't my point. My point was, that at
| the time of Python's creation, all those languages existed
| and have taste. The fact that they were ignored in Python's
| development is an example of it not having taste.
|
| The best example of this is Python's scoping rules. When
| something like Scheme or ML exists and you end up with
| Python's scoping, it's hard for me to understand where the
| taste is.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I suspect Python's popularity was greatly helped by
| ignoring those languages. Your definition of taste isn't
| everyone's.
| bmitc wrote:
| I didn't say it was. I am curious though what others
| consider to be tasteful about Python.
|
| It objectively has ignored features from those languages,
| such as immutability, concurrency, sane scoping,
| functional ways of thinking, pattern matching, better
| REPL, etc. which have all been making their way into most
| modern languages. So what's tasteful about Python? The
| benefits it has that I see are that it's easy to download
| and run for simple scripts and has clean-ish syntax, but
| that's about it. For anything larger, it quickly gets in
| the way.
|
| Popularity is a confusing beast. What has made Python
| popular, in my opinion, is that it was adopted by
| scientists, but in my experience, that group of people
| has little taste in software and little want to figure
| out what else is out there.
| munchbunny wrote:
| > The benefits it has that I see are that it's easy to
| download and run for simple scripts and has clean-ish
| syntax, but that's about it.
|
| You say that like that doesn't count for a lot.
|
| The ease of getting Python to do various small bits of
| automation is the main reason I use it.
| bmitc wrote:
| It counts for a lot, but it's not like that's all people
| use Python for. There are also other languages with
| similar amounts of lesser friction to get going.
|
| And those things aren't enough to justify building large
| software out of.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Python's taste is one of ergonomics. Expressiveness +
| easyness to read, even for a beginner. Python evolved
| from a project that was testing the UX of syntax for
| programming languages.
|
| My favorite example here is that in a function
| definition, `def foo(): \n pass`, the `:` isn't needed, a
| machine can parse it with only the newline. The : is a
| requirement because it made it easier for humans to read
| the language in user tests.
| estomagordo wrote:
| GUID-o. Hehe. I'll show myself out.
| soapdog wrote:
| Here comes P#, I'm seeing myself out as well.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Here comes P#, I 'm seeing myself out as well._
|
| I tried to convince Guido to do a P# April Fool's (I think in
| 2005 or 2006), but he disliked the idea so much I didn't do
| it myself either.
| estomagordo wrote:
| Hey, that's what I tweeted to him!
| binarycodedhex wrote:
| Any guess on what a major FOSS dev grosses? It has to be at least
| $700k. $1.5m/yr? $3m?
|
| About $200k/yr+, it's a good idea to find a lawyer or similar
| talent agent to workout the compensation package because they
| have the skills and can get away with things a hire cannot. I've
| done this before, it saved time, and ended up with a better
| package.
| burgerquizz wrote:
| levels.fyi gives $650k in SF. But it looks quite low to me. I'd
| have say 1M/year at least. Any better guess?
| binarycodedhex wrote:
| I think you're right. The issue is, due to the power law
| distribution of talent, the sample size of such roles (and
| personalities, i.e., how many Python BDFL's are there?) is
| incredibly small, so it makes precise assessments difficult
| and the variance increases wildly since there aren't very
| good comparables.
|
| I think he could command nearly $10 megabucks, give half of
| it away to charities, grants, scholarships, social ventures,
| and underserved areas to promote STEM college prep, and still
| have more money that one ostensibly average, middle-class
| person would know how to invest (real estate on the near
| periphery of burgeoning urban sprawl areas). Microsoft is a
| cash cow and is willing to invest in a solid, deep bench to
| stay competitive, especially in an apparent transition to
| either EEE or adopt OSS.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Someone else commented that he'll be Distinguished Engineer
| (DE). But levels.fyi shows 69, the level under DE, some
| reports of 1-2m. He's almost assuredly receiving 1-3m
| compensation.
| bxbna wrote:
| The ones that let other people do the work or the people who do
| the work themselves? A lot of prominent folks in the Python
| space are the former.
| acbart wrote:
| I don't know about anyone else, but I'm still hopeful for Python
| integration with Excel. That would be a real gamechanger,
| depending on how tight the integration is.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Does this elevate the future possibilities of Pyright in any way?
| maxioatic wrote:
| I wonder if they asked him algorithm problems in his interview /s
|
| This is cool though. I'll be curious to see what he works on.
| marta_morena_28 wrote:
| I am pretty sure they did, unless he got hired at some
| VP/Distinguished Engineer level.
|
| And to be clear: If you are unable to solve these common
| algorithmic questions that companies like Microsoft ask, then
| that's not the right place for you to work. This is a tangent,
| but there are literally thousands of companies that won't
| require you to solve these problems. The thing is, at Microsoft
| & co. you don't just do this in an interview. You do it at your
| job too. We do foundational work in many teams and we need to
| solve algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are
| unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP
| completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a
| different job instead of complaining about the interview
| process?
| adamnemecek wrote:
| You really don't do it at your job.
| paganel wrote:
| I'm taking a cheap shot here, but the people maintaining
| Skype at MS certainly don't do it. And there are such
| examples at other big companies.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I am pretty sure they did, unless he got hired at some VP
| /Distinguished Engineer level_
|
| No way they even considered doing it... That's for people out
| of college...
| fayyazkl wrote:
| Thats certainly invalid. People with 20 years of experience
| or more, are asked questions based upon the role they are
| interviewing for.
|
| If you are applying for a principal or higher engineer role
| and your job involves coding, you are asked coding
| questions. May be not just focused on a complex bookish
| algorithm only, but rather more close to a real life
| distributed programming / synchronization problem etc. for
| example.
| jzebedee wrote:
| He was hired as a Distinguished Engineer.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yes, they hired him at Distinguished Engineer level.
| [deleted]
| lcfcjs wrote:
| It wouldn't be such a problem if developers actually needed
| to know these ridiculous "algorithmic questions" to do their
| job. There are Youtube videos that you can memorize to get
| through the interview, its not difficult. You are acting like
| on an elite few can work for an awful company like Microsoft.
| Thaxll wrote:
| I know we're talking about FANG itw but come on you really
| think people like Guido needs to do any of that? They
| probably don't do "regular" itw, they go to a restaurant with
| some important people and that seels the deal.
| JackFr wrote:
| > unless he got hired at some VP/Distinguished Engineer
| level.
|
| Google or Wikipedia can tell you who Guido van Rossum is.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I believe the "unless" was about the position he was hired
| for, not about who he is.
| andi999 wrote:
| Everybody needs to invert B-trees before breakfast
| echelon wrote:
| I wholeheartedly disagree.
|
| 1. This is Guido van Rossum. If I were him and asked to solve
| puzzles, I'd tell the hiring company to fuck off.
|
| 2. These quizzes aren't so bad, but the pressure and stakes
| make it incredibly stressful. There's no standard, and often
| times the _interviewer_ is the one that sucks.
|
| > We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve
| algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are
| unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP
| completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a
| different job instead of complaining about the interview
| process?
|
| I'm pretty sure your opinion here is not that of your
| employer.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I think the best experiment would have been to have him
| apply blind where the interviewers did not know he was
| Guido -- and see how he fared on the technical interviews.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> I think the best experiment would have been to have
| him apply blind where the interviewers did not know he
| was Guido -- and see how he fared on the technical
| interviews._
|
| That would be amusing, but he'd have to be disguised, as
| he's rather recognizable, having done a lot of 'State of
| the Python' talks and the like.
|
| He doesn't look as much like Rick Moranis as he used to,
| though, so that helps:
| https://gvanrossum.github.io/images/Guido@200dpi.jpg
| nostrademons wrote:
| Counterpoint:
|
| When I was leaving Google the first time, I asked my skip
| lead (who was employee #48 there, ended up running all of
| Search, and was previously a core HotSpot engineer at Sun)
| why he chose to work at a small startup when, coming off of
| HotSpot in 1999, he could work anywhere. He replied "Aside
| from them being one of very few companies with an engineer-
| centric culture, they were the only company that required I
| interview. Everybody else was willing to hire me on the
| spot."
|
| For some personality types - and particularly the ones
| likely to do world-class work - being challenged is a
| _positive_ sign. It means that the employer does their due
| diligence, and they will mostly be working with other
| people who react positively to a challenge.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Sure, but due diligence doesn't mean asking Guido van
| Rossum - who's got bona fides coming out the wazzoo - to
| solve a whiteboarding problem.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| How he solves the problem doesn't matter. You don't care
| in the interview if he had the answer memorized or if he
| fumbles through it.
|
| I do not want to work with anyone who finds that getting
| their hands dirty is beneath them. It is very, very
| rarely going to be a good use of their time to do those
| problems. It will often be a good use of their time to
| teach those problems. A senior engineer, even one who's
| unlikely to work with junior engineers on a regular
| basis, will need to explain their thinking. They need to
| show humility and compassion. Those are practiced
| attributes. This precise situation is the best practice
| you can get - New and Unknown person, some amount of
| challenge and complexity involved.
|
| Thinking that whiteboarding problems are a bad use of
| time is a very strong signal for a senior person who is
| out of touch.
| JackFr wrote:
| At an old job, my boss was moving desks and he came
| across an extra copy of CLR "Introduction to Algorithms"
| and he asked if anyone wanted it. As he was my direct
| supervisor, he said he'd give it to me only if I promised
| never to open it, and only to use it as a monitor stand.
| allenu wrote:
| I can see that. When I interview, I often compare the
| difficulty of the questions that different companies. I
| have noticed that I feel a little more respect to the
| companies that ask the more challenging technical
| questions (not puzzles) vs. the ones that ask the super
| basic ones. It does make me think that the ones asking
| the simpler questions are likely getting lower quality
| candidates and that I would be joining them.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Counter-counter-point. An engineering interview has a
| non-neglible amount of randomness. Maybe you get a grumpy
| interviewer or a noob interview, or your brain freezes
| over.
|
| When you are considering hiring a nobody, this is
| acceptable. You will interview multiple people, and they
| will interview at multiple places, so the randomness
| isn't that important.
|
| But if you want to hire one specific guy as a strategic
| hire, suddenly the randomness may no longer be
| acceptable.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > It means that the employer does their due diligence,
| and they will mostly be working with other people who
| react positively to a challenge.
|
| To me, due diligence would be more like using software
| that someone has created. If it feels snappy then they're
| good enough at algorithms for the kind of software that
| they create, if it doesn't then maybe it's worth looking
| into whether or not there's a good reason for that.
|
| Like if you apply for a job at the NYT, I doubt they make
| you do a timed writing test with people staring at you
| and asking you questions in the middle. They probably
| just read some of the previous work you've done.
| bregma wrote:
| Are you kidding? They'd make Ansel Adams do a timed test
| on how to use Elements to do colour correction.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| When I left uni, I got around 15 job offers. I went with
| the one with the lowest pay, because that's where I had
| go to through the most difficult interview process.
|
| (Unfortunately this happened in a small Eastern-European
| country, so the company was an investment bank, not
| Google.)
| user5994461 wrote:
| Well, he wanted to meet the team and have an idea
| who/what he would be working with.
|
| It's really scary to go to company that is willing to
| hire you without ever talking to you.
| fizixer wrote:
| > This is Guido van Rossum. If I were him and asked to
| solve puzzles, I'd tell the hiring company to fuck off.
|
| Not sure what you're trying to get at:
|
| MacOS homebrew creator is an effin nobody compared to
| Guido, therefore he should "know his place", "get in line"
| and invert a binary tree on the whiteboard and act like an
| obedient tech interview candidate that he really is?
|
| OR
|
| MacOS homebrew creator should've told Google to fuck off?
| driverdan wrote:
| > MacOS homebrew creator should've told Google to fuck
| off?
|
| Yes, that's exactly what he should have done.
| [deleted]
| deeeeplearning wrote:
| Imagine a University asking a Physics Nobel Laureate to
| solve QM Problems from an undergrad textbook in order to
| get hired as a Professor. It would the height of lunacy
| and incredibly insulting.
| a-nikolaev wrote:
| Guido is not a Physics Nobel Laureate. Going with the
| Physics analogy, Python is more like an overgrown masters
| level project, not a Nobel prize level by far. He did a
| good job at growing the Python community, and this is a
| great achievement! It requires certain personal traits
| not everyone has. But at the technical level, he made
| many beginners mistakes when designing Python, which he
| tried to fix later, but not always successfully.
| nicklaf wrote:
| An overgrown masters level project, eh? You could
| probably say the same thing about the founding of the
| United States!
|
| "The US constitution is like an overgrown enlightenment
| dissertation. The founding fathers did a good job at
| growing the United States, and this is a great
| achievement! It requires certain personal traits not
| everyone has. But at a technical level, they made many
| beginner's mistakes when drafting the constitution, which
| the country tried to fix later, but not always
| successfully."
|
| :-P
| a-nikolaev wrote:
| Maybe.
| Twixes wrote:
| I love Homebrew - but it really isn't that much of an
| achievement compared to damn Python, and I also have no
| idea who is its creator.
| fizixer wrote:
| Homebrew is 11 years old. I'm willing to bet there are as
| many people (likely fewer) people who knew Guido in 2002,
| when Python was 11 years old, or even 2005, when Google
| hired Guido.
|
| And I'm willing to bet when Google hired Guido in 2005,
| they didn't put him through a coding challenge
| humiliation clown show day.
| [deleted]
| ownagefool wrote:
| From his twitter profile:
|
| """ Python's BDFL-emeritus, Distinguished Engineer at
| Microsoft, Computer History Fellow. Opinions are my own.
| He/him. """
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| "Hello Guido thanks for coming in, we would like you to open
| up visual studio code and create a sudoku solver that can
| solve this partially filled out board"
| speedgoose wrote:
| Time to use prolog to get your revenge on the interviewers.
| Cactus2018 wrote:
| A Sudoku Solver in APL
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs
| jodrellblank wrote:
| More appropriately, in Prolog (by Markus Triska)
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=5KUdEZTu06o
| speedgoose wrote:
| Very nice, and I can understand this one.
| cgh wrote:
| Thanks for this link. I took a course on logic
| programming in school and it made a big impression. I
| found Prolog to be pretty mindblowing at the time and I'm
| happy to see it still is.
| kop316 wrote:
| I think this was in response to this:
|
| https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
| orthonormel wrote:
| His Twitter actually says "Distinguished Engineer at
| Microsoft"
| atraac wrote:
| > _The thing is, at Microsoft & co. you don't just do this in
| an interview. You do it at your job too._
|
| Oh so that's why the Azure Portal UI is such garbage. Their
| frontend developers are just busy solving knapsack
| problems...
| __s wrote:
| Hi, I'm a programmer for Microsoft. I didn't have to answer
| silly algorithm questions for them to hire me. I'm nowhere
| close to VP/Distinguished Engineer level
|
| _(that said, my path to being hired did involve writing a
| sudoku solver, but that wasn 't in an interview for a
| position at Microsoft)_
| kodah wrote:
| This comment really just drives home the nail of how awful
| the state of interviewing, and especially the mental state of
| some interviewers, in this industry with a backhoe bucket.
|
| I really just want to thank you for putting this useless
| mentality on display.
| whymauri wrote:
| I know it's not Microsoft, but D. E. Shaw asked Larry
| Summers math puzzles when he interviewed there. At the
| time, he was the president of Harvard University.
|
| I think it's my favorite example of how crazy some
| interview processes can get, lol.
| creddit wrote:
| I'm not sure what's crazier to me: asking someone to
| demonstrate a live proficiency of an abstract skill that
| is only tangentially related to that actual day-to-day
| activities of a role or just assuming that because
| someone has some high credential that they would be good
| in a given role.
| user5994461 wrote:
| DE Shaw is a financial company filled with maths guys,
| doing statistical analysis and modeling all day. A math
| puzzle is the most normal question you could be asked
| there.
|
| The real question is why Larry Summers is going to a
| quant interview? Did he apply for a quant role?
| whymauri wrote:
| They hired him as a managing director.
| dddbbb wrote:
| For many roles at a hedge fund, being able to do
| mathematics quickly and intuitively is a valuable skill.
| Not sure why an economist applying for an MD job would
| need to be tested on that, though.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| He should have called their bluff and failed the quiz on
| purpose. What are they going to do?
| bit_logic wrote:
| Next time there's a tech interview discussion and someone
| defends it, linking this thread will be very useful.
|
| Almost 30 years of BDFL of Python, sorry don't care, go do
| 200 leetcode before talking to us. And if you don't spit
| out the answer a few seconds faster than that fresh
| graduate, clearly you're a lesser engineer and should be
| rejected.
| maxioatic wrote:
| Wow, so much salt. It was a joke.
| xapata wrote:
| In that case, it was an unnecessary joke and not helpful to
| the conversation.
| maxioatic wrote:
| Sorry, I'll refrain from humor from now on?
| xapata wrote:
| Seems reasonable.
| vamos_davai wrote:
| Go to reddit if you want to make average IQ humor.
| jraph wrote:
| Please don't, keep being fun!
|
| It works here on HN too, many of my comments are upvoted
| jokes and I liked yours. It's sad it attracted animosity
| though.
|
| I like browsing HN mostly for the interesting
| discussions, but I enthusiastically take the occasional
| jokes that come with them.
|
| (I might have been upvoted by people taking my jokes
| seriously now that I think about it. I don't know if this
| is a terrifying or a funny thought!)
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| You should have left "/s" at the end of your comment, it's
| really hard to distinguish between a joke and stupidity on
| the Internet.
| AQuantized wrote:
| To me this undermines any humour the comment may had to
| begin with.
| chippy wrote:
| They did add a /s to the end. The user you were replying
| to wrote the comment that the stupid comment was replying
| to!
| maxioatic wrote:
| It is there. At the end of the line.
| paulnechifor wrote:
| > NP completeness
|
| Programmer here. It's true. I deal with NP completeness every
| day.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Why the fuck would CS graduates be afraid of DP problems, NP-
| completeness or approximation algos??? That's literally the
| table stakes of our profession.
|
| The problem is rewarding rote memorization in a whiteboard
| interview, at the expense of actual understanding, and
| ability to research the problem.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| That might be a fair statement for some roles, but what
| about the second part where you code it up and write the
| code on a whiteboard w/o running/debugging and have to get
| it right in 45min?
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand..?
|
| Do you mean it should be used as an actual speed test?
| mayank wrote:
| > that's literally the table stakes of our profession
|
| Table stakes for what exactly?
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Computer science graduates...? Like I said in the
| comment.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Why the fuck would CS graduates be afraid of DP problems,
| NP-completeness or approximation algos??? That's literally
| the table stakes of our profession.
|
| If the profession being discussed is "academic work in
| Computer Science", sure.
|
| If it is "software development", those things absolutely
| are not really "table stakes".
|
| If it is "software engineering", then I don't think there
| is broad consensus on what that profession even is, much
| less what table stakes in it are.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Are you seriously claiming Guido van Rossum was hired for
| software development/engineering..? I don't understand
| the context switching here.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Are you seriously claiming Guido van Rossum was hired
| for software development/engineering..?
|
| No, nor do I think he was he hired for the other thing I
| discussed, academic computer science. The post I was
| responding to made a general comment about "CS graduates"
| and "our profession"; I was responding to that. Whether
| that post itself was material to, or merely tangential
| to, the discussion of GvR's hiring at Microsoft is an
| argument that, while perhaps interesting to some, was not
| the focus or concern of my response.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| My post was a response to a specific comment, please
| don't take it out of context.
| emddudley wrote:
| Because these problems can have some subtleties that are
| hard to get right in a high-pressure environment. Some
| interviewers will completely write you off for small
| mistakes.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| That sounds interesting! Do you have any examples?
|
| I would have thought that if you actually needed people
| to perform under pressure, you would design your test
| explicitly around that, instead of using "comfort with
| the whiteboard" as a proxy...
| AI_WAIFU wrote:
| Because unlike in the real world, you can't just google the
| solution or look it up in a textbook during an interview.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| > I am pretty sure they did
|
| Lol! I'd bet my year salary they didn't.
| esyir wrote:
| Well, you might want to check guido's twitter before making
| that bet.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| What exactly am I supposed to check in his Twitter?
| esyir wrote:
| Whoops, mismatched your reply to the wrong branch of the
| comment tree
| fayyazkl wrote:
| Every body is asked some thing close enough. At higher
| levels, often focus is not on coding, but enough depth of
| design where a person of such profile might end up
| educating the interviewer - while satisfying their
| requirements.
|
| That being said, ability to solve coding problems
| efficiently (not necessarily spit A* graph algo in sleep),
| but a decent close to real life coding challenge is fair
| game.
| deeeeplearning wrote:
| >We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve
| algorithmic problems practically every week.
|
| Keep telling yourself that as you fix mindless bugs in some
| Advertising platform lol.
| ponker wrote:
| You must be injecting crack directly into your frontal lobe
| if you think that the creator of the world's third most
| important programming language being asked an algorithms
| question (unlikely) and failing it (entirely possible) means
| that he's unqualified to do "foundational work."
|
| I had a Nobel Prize winner as a physics professor in college
| who got three successive different wrong answers when
| attempting a freshman physics problem in office hours. That
| doesn't mean that physics isn't the right place for him to
| work.
| jrib wrote:
| > third most important programming language
|
| not going to debate that, but I'm curious, what do you rank
| as #1 and #2?
| phkahler wrote:
| The tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots.
| dkarlovi wrote:
| That's fair, I guess.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> The tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots._
|
| That list is ranking languages by current popularity,
| though, rather than 'importance'.
|
| I'd define 'importance' as more along the lines of
| "amount of havoc created if all software written using
| that language were broken/deleted at once".
| fermigier wrote:
| Python is number 2 now, according to
| https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-overtakes-
| java-t... :)
|
| We should not give too much importance to this, but the
| fact is that Python is now ranked consistently #1, #2 or
| #3 in sufficiently many rankings to consider it
| seriously.
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| LOL what an obnoxious comment.
| pcj-github wrote:
| Not taking anything away from GVR, but I bet he does not pass
| leetcode medium/hards in time allotted without specifically
| practicing these for a while. I could be wrong.
| breck wrote:
| I did a dozen or so interviews at MS. No one ever asked me if
| an interviewee "passed/failed". The only boolean was "hire/no
| hire", which took into account many more dimensions. But I
| know people that interviewed over 1,000 people, so my
| knowledge is more anecdotal.
|
| I'd imagine no matter the problem he would breeze through an
| interview and leave the interviewer with some enlightenment
| on programming. It wasn't necessarily about whether the code
| was "correct". I remember once interviewing a ~20-year old
| for the summer program who when I gave him a problem he
| started talking about some linear algebra and geometry that I
| didn't even know were relevant but quickly made sense to me.
| But he was so humble about it, and looking to me like he
| wasn't sure if it was the right approach to take (It was hard
| to keep a poker face and not give away that he was a
| "definite hire" after about 5 minutes). His 5-liner to solve
| it had one bug but he clearly "passed" with flying colors.
| Unfortunately for us he ended up joining a startup in SV (and
| now is doing big things there).
| psyc wrote:
| Notable programmers, those you know by name, are given
| positions that you get by having a conversation with a VP.
| Source: worked there for a long time.
| bit_logic wrote:
| Wow, the replies to this actually saying Guido van Rossum
| should do an algorithm/DS leetcode interview.
|
| It's so ridiculous to see these replies. So Microsoft should've
| sent Guido van Rossum a note saying, hey study algorithm/DS for
| at least a month and do 100 leetcode before you come talk to us
| or it's a waste of time, thanks, bye.
|
| Discussions of the industry tech interview process are now
| poisoned by these factors:
|
| * There is an entire industry built around tech interview prep
| now (books, websites, practice/mock interviews). Many would
| defend this practice because their paycheck directly depends on
| it.
|
| * Many see this as a hazing ritual that protects their high
| compensation and often their egos as well. These people are
| often young and will eventually see how harmful these
| interviews are when they get older and need to switch jobs. But
| by then there will be a new generation of young engineers
| defending the practice.
| acqq wrote:
| Previously:
|
| Google bureaucracy expected from _Ken Thompson_ (!) to pass a
| C language exam (!!).
|
| https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_o.
| ..
|
| "So Mr Thompson, you say you have some programming skills"
| mattlondon wrote:
| I believe this is actually about checking in code, not
| about getting a job.
|
| From what I understand it is like a "driving license" for
| each language - if you haven't passed the driving test you
| can still drive but you need to have an instructor keep an
| eye on you. If you haven't passed the coding test you need
| someone to review your code before submitting.
| jimbokun wrote:
| So Ken Thompson created go and gofmt so he wouldn't have
| to deal with that crap any more.
| mianos wrote:
| It is certainly not a driver's license, this makes as
| much sense as asking Hamilton or Vittel to do a driving
| test before giving them a job as a driver.
|
| That said, I would not be surprised this would happen at
| Google as they truly believe their process is vastly
| superior, as they believe themselves.
|
| Pretty sure they would ask Linus to to a C programming
| test as well, and score him badly because he can't
| remember the exact details of some algorithm he has not
| used since he wrote the first lines of Linux.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It's mostly about getting used to the language usage
| style used in Google (the style guides are open, so you
| can see it).
|
| The philosophy is that all Google code base should look
| like it was written by 1 person. It's great actually in
| practice: code in a big company should be hard to write
| and easy to read, as it's read by many people.
| acqq wrote:
| > I believe this is actually about checking in code, not
| about getting a job.
|
| I'd say it's about doing the work for which he came
| there, from TFA:
|
| "Google hired Thompson to create a new language, Go. But
| Google also requires all of its recruits to pass a
| language test. According to Thompson, he hasn't quite got
| round to it yet - and so can't submit code."
|
| And no, I have no understanding for that utter stupidity,
| or any attempt to accept it.
| B-Con wrote:
| As a Googler, that statement is just wrong. They were
| looking for a fun story and somehow got just the right
| quote to make one.
|
| Code committed to the _internal repo_ requires a _review_
| from someone certified familiar with that language 's
| _internal style guide_.
|
| He was hired to work on Go, not C, and just didn't get
| around to writing enough C to bother getting that
| certification. He can write C whenever he wants to, just
| like literally every other engineer, he would just get a
| style guide review at review time.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > There is an entire industry built around tech interview
| prep now (books, websites, practice/mock interviews). Many
| would defend this practice because their paycheck directly
| depends on it.
|
| Or you know... an algorithm and data structures class that's
| part of a serious Engineering/CS curriculum.
| bassman9000 wrote:
| _an algorithm and data structures class that 's part of a
| serious Engineering/CS curriculum_
|
| Good luck remembering the kind of details a typical
| interview asks for 10 years into the business.
| closeparen wrote:
| That's enough for passing familiarity with what the
| algorithms are / pointers to reference material when
| appropriate. Not nearly enough to perform on command from
| memory in 20-40 minutes.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I mean,
|
| If someone knows he's interviewing at a place where there
| will be a coding interview, he would be crazy not to take
| a look at his algorithm textbook.
|
| And maybe if the course only only gave the candidate a
| passing familiarity it wasn't thorough enough?
| closeparen wrote:
| At the end of Princeton's Algorithms I-II on Coursera
| you've done fewer than 20 implementations, and those were
| open-book assignments with week-long deadlines.
|
| A reasonable interview prep cycle would be closer to 200
| practice problems, under time pressure.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| Microsoft hiring is my centralized, and not all teams do
| leetcode interviews. Many non- famous developers have been
| hired there without leetcode as well.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Possibly a six hour panel interview on Javascript trivia,
| instead.
| groos wrote:
| With a known quantity like Guido, you just try to convince them
| how fun it would be work at Microsoft.
| strulovich wrote:
| There's plenty of issues around algorithmic questions, and it's
| even possible he would fail them, but there's still important
| value in asking them.
|
| Senior engineers in such companies need to work and cooperate
| with hundreds of people. If they find solving such problems
| beneath them, or expect to be treated as a higher class of
| person, or not willing to get hands dirty, they will not be as
| valuable as employees. (Occasionally, the lone genius is great,
| but the lone genius is a worse employee than the genius that
| can cooperate well)
|
| My company would keep doing such interviews, but the
| expectations change of course. A new grad needs to do these
| well. More senior people can do worse, and make up for it using
| other skills showcased in other interviews, or based on their
| record.
|
| But if you find a senior person that finds solving algorithmic
| questions is beneath them, you might want to be careful about
| them and how they will interact with your company's culture.
| pc86 wrote:
| I don't think the problem is senior folks believing answering
| questions about bubble sort beneath them (I'm sure some do
| but I doubt it's the norm), I think the problem is that
| 99.99% of developers at all levels don't need to know how
| bubble sort works to do their jobs well.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's not a question of status, but rather the utility of
| memorizing algorithms as an indicator of success. Notably,
| it's probably not because Google exists and anyway the
| majority of one's time isn't finding the optimal algorithm.
| peteradio wrote:
| Guido is not a senior engineer.. he's a "special projects"
| person. Fewer than 50 such persons would exist in the
| microsoft stable. Why would you have someone who functions at
| such a high level bother with low level implementation?
| There's thousands of shit munching nerds who can implement
| flawlessly but who need the overarching guidance to deliver
| product.
| anfeldman wrote:
| Because most really good designers also did low level
| implementation? Thompson, Ritchie, Leroy, Torvalds. Heck,
| while I don't know for sure, probably Dave Cutler did, too.
|
| I don't know any product that's pleasant to use that was
| developed in the way you describe. Python certainly wasn't.
| rndgermandude wrote:
| I never remember the nitty-gritty details of the more complex
| algorithms and data structures, I only remember they exist
| and their important properties. If I then have to implement
| one, I consult google or books. Googling often has the neat
| side effect that you'll sometimes find
| refinements/improvements or other (new) potentially better
| algorithms to solve a particular problem. Or somebody might
| have done the heavy lifting already and packaged it up under
| a compatible license (if it isn't something simple like
| leftPad).
|
| I mean, it's OK to ask for basic algorithms in interviews, to
| see if the interviewee has at least some understanding of
| basic stuff and/or can think on their feet and/or can reason
| about problems appropriately...
|
| But I would still welcome it if instead of giving an
| interviewee a boring, memorizable problem like "invert a
| binary tree", the interviewer would find a more general
| problem and would see how the employee would tackle it, and
| if the interviewee refers to binary trees as part of the
| solution without writing out a full implementation from
| memory that's OK (as long as binary trees would be a valid
| approach to solve the problem, of course).
| strulovich wrote:
| Just for reference, my company does not ask anyone to
| implement a binary tree or any well known algorithms in
| coding interviews.
|
| I see a bunch of comments that look to me as strawman, or
| really bad interview experience.
|
| A good coding interview should: - not be known by the
| interviewee if they spent even a few weeks on leetcode -
| avoid requiring anything that isn't covered in an average
| CS101 class - draw its challenges from the need to process
| a new problem, and gradually uncover the edge cases in it
| and how to handle them gracefully.
|
| I don't do leetcode. But went now and tried the first hard
| question I found. It was "find the median of two sorted
| arrays". I find this question to be a good example of very
| little background knowledge needed. (You'd need to know how
| to deal with arrays, and what's a median - not everyone
| will know these, but it's a pretty low bar)
|
| This question already has plenty of room for mistakes, edge
| cases and problem solving. I'm going to take a wild guess
| from knowing talented veteran engineers I've seen that they
| can surely handle it in the interview structures I've been
| experienced.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| > the interviewer would find a more general problem and
| would see how the employee would tackle it
|
| those are the best interviews imho. specially when both the
| candidate and the interviewer engage into a productive
| discussion about the solution the candidate gave.
|
| at the same time, those take time and a lot of companies
| want a "fast" hiring pipeline, which leads to "invert a
| binary tree on this whiteboard!".
| cryptica wrote:
| Being retired is more boring than working for a giant
| bureaucratic corporation?
|
| He must have no imagination. When I had a day job at a big
| company, I would start working on open source in the afternoon as
| soon as I got home from work then I would stay up late working on
| it. The next day I would be tired and depressed that I would have
| to go to the office to work on some useless product and could not
| wait to go back home to continue the real work.
| seemslegit wrote:
| And the next language to become unusable without a microsoft-
| controlled ecosystem is...
| qz2 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE
| tsjq wrote:
| Embrace, Extend, Extinguish .
| seemslegit wrote:
| Nah that was the old MS, new MS just replaces own with rent.
| estomagordo wrote:
| What were the previous examples of this?
| seemslegit wrote:
| C#, F#, Typescript, JavaScript via npm
| Master_Odin wrote:
| C# and F# are great examples of how MS is willing to allow
| people out of their ecosystem to use them with all their
| efforts with .NET Core and having it run places other than
| Windows.
|
| npm is trivial to replace with yarn and a custom registry.
| zyx321 wrote:
| Congratulations to Microsoft on successfully hiring a developer
| with 30 years of Python experience. Living the dream right there.
| chrshawkes wrote:
| Nice, big fan.
| breatheoften wrote:
| Typescript for python?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| salex89 wrote:
| Start with rewriting the Azure Python SDK.
| existencebox wrote:
| Honest response, if somewhat off-topic, since I can't pass this
| up: How could it be improved/what's been most painful for you?
|
| Full disclosure, I'm one of the <many> maintainers working on a
| subset of the Azure Python SDK. Currently, there actually _is_
| a large-scale rewrite in progress to bring the various SDKs up
| to a consistent level of quality and python standards, since
| it's no secret the original batch of SDKs grew rather
| organically. As such, this is a VERY APT time to hear this sort
| of comment. (And yes, I'm taking it totally deadpan even if it
| wasn't necessarily meant that way :P)
|
| Do feel encouraged as well to file issues on the azure-sdk-for-
| python github as well; there are more formal triage processes
| there than "I happened to read this over lunch" :)
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| Why do I expect a type safe Python? I'm sure the product I'm
| imagining will also finally give a Python inspired/compatible
| language a decent module system, but I'm really not a big fan of
| the direction Microsoft is carving out for software development
| at large. I'll admit this post is presumptuous.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Retirement has always sounded boring anyways. Congrats to Guido,
| I wonder what he will be working on specifically. Python could be
| improved on Windows, even simple cases don't work quite as
| expected always. I would expect Python is used decently widely at
| MS anyways. Maybe Python being first class on .NET? Or some
| Python specific things for Azure.
| lostmsu wrote:
| There already is IronPython. But it lacks community, and
| stalled after 2.7 release.
|
| All CPython alternatives stall do due to the widely used C API
| (required for NumPy, TensorFlow, etc). This API is very CPython
| specific.
|
| There is some work on both sides, that might overcome the issue
| though: CPython is trying to decouple API from the
| implementation details, while .NET is working on better C
| interop story (.NET 5 just introduced ability to export managed
| functions as C functions).
| pearjuice wrote:
| Do you think Microsoft can convince him to drop the whitespace-
| as-syntax?
| jedberg wrote:
| Why? That's my most favorite part of Python. It makes the code
| so much more readable.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Ruby manages to be much more readable without the white
| spaces.
|
| The fault with Ruby is its less useful stb lib and lesser
| performances.
| orf wrote:
| IMO Ruby is far, far less readable. Way more magic, endless
| ways to do the same things with slight differences (blocks,
| procs and lambdas) etc.
|
| Plus everyone mostly indents the code the same as Python
| anyway... so. Meh.
| blargmaster42_8 wrote:
| Let's hope so, that and not beeing properly typed keeps me from
| using it.
| save_ferris wrote:
| If this includes improving dependency and runtime version
| management, I'm pumped. It's been a couple of years since I've
| used python, but those two things seemed like such warts compared
| to the rest of the experience.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Classical Google lineage: "From 2005 to December 2012, he worked
| at Google, where he spent half of his time developing the Python
| language." Now he'll spend the rest of his life at Microsoft
| where he'll giveaway the Google-investment.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| And will never make as much money as Google or Microsoft out of
| his own work...
| taude wrote:
| Fun historical story about Microsoft and Python. I worked there
| for a bit back in the mid-90s when they acquired a startup who's
| merchant server software was written in Python 1.12 or something.
| After Microsoft acquired, it became the engine for running
| ecommerce on MSN, and eventually became part of the SiteServer
| suite. The first port to run the software at Microsoft involved
| wrapping the Python code with a shim that exposed it as COM
| interfaces. I think it was eventually rewritten in C++ with ATL
| or something, but that was after I was no longer there.
|
| I still remember the first O'Reily pink Python book waiting on my
| desk back then when I joined.
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