Python Critique

Question

Hi,

I'm using Python now for about two months, and to be honest, it really made me love programming again. After programming in C, Java, and worst of all, C++, Python is incredibly fun. Thinking that I approach such language with all positive bias, I would love to hear some critique of Python language. Beside its extremely rich library, superb readability, builtin support for arbitrary size integers, etc. what are the negative features of Python? It is slow, naturally, for its interpreted nature. But how about language design, what parts are designed bad? And what major features the language lacks?

Please make your critiques around the core of Python. I mean, it is a scripting language so saying that "it shouldn't be a scripting language" is not much relevant, in my opinion. Instead, for example, please focus on how as a scripting language, it is inadequate.

I believe some critique and brainstorming would be fabulous for me to evaluate Python objectively.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

1. Speed comes in mind.
2. I am not sure if this is a negative point but object oriented programming is very different.
3. Sometimes due to scripting nature intellisence doesnt work perfectly.

In any case I Love python.

Answer 2

Minor gripe but significant white-space feels wrong. (As someone who doesn't use python day to day)

Answer 3

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/530530/python-2-x-gotchas-and-landmines
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371966/are-there-any-good-reasons-why-i-should-not-use-python

Answer 4

Inner classes could be really inner, and have access to parent class's namespace.

Answer 5

Actually one main issue with CPython implementation is the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) wich avoid any concurrent multi-threading on a multi-core processor.

This is to be changed thanks to the unladen-swallow project: an optimization branch of CPython, intended to be fully compatible and significantly faster.

Answer 6

Python has multiple inheritance and some people think that it is evil.

But I don't think so. You can always avoid using it.

I love Python more than anything else. It rocks.

Answer 7

I'm still learning Python, and my first language was Perl, so take my opinions with however much salt you like.

One of my biggest gripes about Python is the syntax. Triple-quoted strings seem like a syntax-decision from my nightmares (or a David Lynch movie - same thing, right?), and double-underscores seem appropriate to me in C, but not in a language that provides list comprehensions. There has to be a better way to mark certain features as internal or special than just calling it __feature__.

Another gripe of mine is the immutability of strings. Why do I need to write var = func(var) to do a simple search-and-replace?

Another minor gripe is that functions require parenthesis around their arguments, even when not syntactically ambiguous, but at that point I might as well just go back to Perl.

Answer 8

Multiple inheritance seems to cause problems whenever it gets used, in my experience. Just don't. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea when it was implemented, and I'm sure some people make use of it without problems. To me, it leads to a world of hurt.

The GIL can lead to scalability issues, depending on what you're doing. For me, that's the most common reason why I decide to switch to another languge, but YMMV.

Everything to do with the double-underscore notation feels like a really ugly hack to me; almost like they've been implemented as afterthoughts. I really hate typing "def __init__" rather than Ruby's "def initialize"; surely Python could have reserved method names such as "initialize" and "destroy"...

That said, I try to use Python, Ruby or Erlang as much as possible these days. They're "fun" languages, whereas others feel too much like work!

Answer 9

I like python, but:

• No tail recursion optimization (in CPython)
• Global Interpreter Lock (GIL)
• Assignments are not expressions
• Unicode string handling is somewhat awkward
• Can be hard to deploy as a desktop app due to cross platform issues, language version, etc.
• self everywhere can make you feel like OO was bolted on, even though it wasn't.

Answer 10

unicode integration in 2.X. Having u"string" everywhere is ugly, and it's easy to miss handling encoding properly. Some modules expect str instead of unicode, etc...

(Luckily it seems pretty much fixed in 3.X)