Digital Analogue

Verdict: enh

Well, Python's okay. There are definitely some neat things about it, like list comprehensions (which subsume map and filter into a single, more generic form that incidentally makes lambda a lot less necessary, though that's still present too). Making % a sort of universal sprintf operator was a cute idea, and allowing while to have an else just like if can, well, it seems counterintuitive at first, but can make for some nice, elegant algorithm specifications.

Some things are just a lot more clunky, though. (Than perl, which is my main point of comparison—they occupy roughly the same ecological niche.) For instance, all functions need to be declared prior to use, afaict. That makes it harder for me to organise my files the way I want to. I kept running into problems with things being passed by value when I wanted reference, or vice versa, and the way it handles global/local namespaces is just bizarre. (You can read from variables declared in an outer scope, but if you try to assign to them, a new local variable with that name is silently created—and disappears at the end of the current scope, of course. Eeuuchh.)

The worst thing, though, was the ubiquity of the exception system. As in Java, any time anything goes wrong, an exception is raised, although even more so—iteration, for instance, works by just calling next() until the StopIteration exception is raised. That's just an abuse of the word "exception". But even where the term "exception" is legitimate, e.g. with an IOError, a system that is merely mildly annoying in Java becomes unforgivably cumbersome in a language that is intended for (or at least used a lot in) quick scripting. In Perl, to open a file and quit gracefully if anything goes wrong, you write

  open FI, "<", $filename or die "Bad file $filename, aborting";

But in Python, you write

  try:
    fi = open (filename, 'r')
  except IOError:
    print "Bad file %s, aborting" % filename
    sys.exit(1)

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that a lot more Python scripts just skip the error checking. Of course, the consequences are milder: rather than mysterious oddness you just bother the user with several lines of confusing tech-gook (from an uncaught exception). But a well-written script should have the checking either way, and in the Perl script it is not clunky and even aids readability if done right, while in the equivalent Python script it chews up five times as much space and interrupts the flow of the code.

So my overall opinion is totally lukewarm. I suppose I'll write a few more programs in it just to get a better feel... but I'm not really in any rush to do it.

"Toss out words like "sexual behavior of teenagers," "virginity" and "highly effective" and the parents of adolescents claw their way to newsstand and keyboard in a panicky search for enlightenment, looking, always, for relief from the kind of angst they heaped on their own elders just long enough ago not to remember." --Salon

Posted by blahedo at 1:59am on 7 Jan 2007