How good Phyton is?

[Twar3Draconis]

Fun stuff. I'd say C# is viable, since it IS cross-platform. You just need to use Mono instead of .Net.

[Neon Lemmy Koopa]

Fun stuff. I'd say C# is viable, since it IS cross-platform. You just need to use Mono instead of .Net.

I didn't know that. I knew there was something about Mono and Visual Basic.NET. Didnt know it was for C# too. We all got our opinions tho. I had a hard time with C# for some reason though.

Trust me: you don't want to use C#. It's built on MS's crappy .Net framework, it's slow, it's buggy and it's not really cross platform.

I'm ducking and covering, since there's a good chance Jake will read this thread.

I don't get it. Im just going to assume its some inside joke?

[LVUER]

Fun stuff. I'd say C# is viable, since it IS cross-platform. You just need to use Mono instead of .Net.

I didn't know that. I knew there was something about Mono and Visual Basic.NET. Didnt know it was for C# too. We all got our opinions tho. I had a hard time with C# for some reason though.

Trust me: you don't want to use C#. It's built on MS's crappy .Net framework, it's slow, it's buggy and it's not really cross platform.

I'm ducking and covering, since there's a good chance Jake will read this thread.

I don't get it. Im just going to assume its some inside joke?

Try to search all Jake's posts, you'll understand what he means ^_^

BTW, I believe more in older language since they have been tested and true in battlefield.

[Aenakume]

BTW, I believe more in older language since they have been tested and true in battlefield.

Yes! That's why i always program with punch cards in Fortran 66.

[PyTom]

Fortran 66. Noob. I've attended meetings of the committee responsible for maintaining ALGOL-60!

(They don't work very hard at it, IMO.)

[Scout]

Whatever. Call me back when you've got a Python implementation written in COBOL, then we'll talk about reliability.

[Jake]

Since I'm apparently expected to make a comment:

Except C#, which I've never used, for some reason. No fault of C#'s, it's just that I haven't done much with the CLR.

Trust me: you don't want to use C#. It's built on MS's crappy .Net framework, it's slow, it's buggy and it's not really cross platform.
...
I didn't know that. I knew there was something about Mono and Visual Basic.NET. Didnt know it was for C# too.

Mono is for .NET. All .NET languages, from C# to Managed C++ to VB.NET to COBOL.NET to IronPython all generate the same bytecode (MSIL) which is JIT compiled to run on the user's machine as native code. The MS runtime is responsible for that compilation step and providing the runtime libraries; the Mono framework does exactly the same thing. There's a couple of quirks where the people who developed it clearly didn't read the specification well enough, but to be honest it's surprisingly good.

For example, just last weekend several of us played a scrolling shooter I had written entirely in C# on someone's MacBook Pro. I don't recall right now whether it was running OSX or Linux at the time, but it wasn't Windows.


And really... I know it's fashionable to just presume that everything MS does is total shit just because of a number of obvious examples, but they do actually do some things very well, as well. One of those things, it seems, is putting together compilers and APIs. In some cases, (for example, thanks to the way it manages memory) the CLR outperforms native C++ code for some not-so-uncommon operations.

I have no idea where you got the idea it was buggy, because I'm pretty sure it simply isn't true. At least, no more buggy than - say - Java, or GLibC. In six-and-a-half years of professional C# development I think I've seen one thing which remotely resembled a bug; it was a weird corner case and it was fixed years ago, now.


On top of all this, C# is a very easy language to use, so long as you understand the OOP paradigm, with more-friendly libraries (in my opinion) than Java, which is the most similar language I can think of. It's a lot safer than C++, thanks to being 'managed', and it has cool language features like lambda expressions which you will wonder how you did without if you come from a language which doesn't support them. It's nearly always possible to write simple, elegant, effective code in C#, which performs well and isn't so risky as developing the same thing in an unmanaged language.

There are downsides, of course. It's not a language for writing OS code in, since the CLR runs atop the OS. It's not so portable as Java, even, because while there's a 'Compact' CLR for Windows Mobile devices, to my knowledge nobody's constructed a hardware implementation or anything; it only really runs on four platforms - Windows, Linux, OSX and Windows Mobile. (Strictly speaking Win98 is a different platform, but I'd rather ignore that and pretend it doesn't exist.) It tends to have a larger memory footprint than the same app would outside of the CLR. It requires a runtime to be installed. And sure, for some applications it's going to be a bit slower than the equivalent program written in C++... but really, it's far from all practical applications, and we're talking "the difference between two sports cars" kind of 'slower', not anything remotely like the early days of Java unless you're seriously low on RAM.

[LVUER]

Since Jake's already here, perhaps I can too ask him the question of the topic, "How good Phyton is?"

[PyTom]

There is no Phyton programming language. There is a Python language.

[Wintermoon]

For the C-with-classes-and-garbage-collection-and runtime-checks niche, I'm mildly fond of D. It has many nice improvements over C++, including an almost sane syntax for template metaprogramming, and it compiles to native code, which means there's no need to distribute and install a big runtime package. I find it infinitely more pleasant to use than Java. On the minus side, the language is still immature and some useful features from C++ are still missing.

[Neon Lemmy Koopa]

Mono is for .NET. All .NET languages, from C# to Managed C++ to VB.NET to COBOL.NET to IronPython all generate the same bytecode (MSIL) which is JIT compiled to run on the user's machine as native code. The MS runtime is responsible for that compilation step and providing the runtime libraries; the Mono framework does exactly the same thing. There's a couple of quirks where the people who developed it clearly didn't read the specification well enough, but to be honest it's surprisingly good.

Mono was good when I tried to port all my VB.Net stuff to Linux. Ran no different than it did on windows.

And really... I know it's fashionable to just presume that everything MS does is total shit just because of a number of obvious examples, but they do actually do some things very well, as well.

Just for the record, Im not part of the whole "Microsoft sucks" bandwagon. They have some things worth using, some that out do others, like Office, and Windows Media Player. And at the same time, they have their not too great things, like Vista, or Windows Mobile 6.1.

I have no idea where you got the idea it was buggy, because I'm pretty sure it simply isn't true. At least, no more buggy than - say - Java, or GLibC. In six-and-a-half years of professional C# development I think I've seen one thing which remotely resembled a bug; it was a weird corner case and it was fixed years ago, now.

Well, being a Java programmer, I agree there are some problems with Java, mainly memory management and such. Although maybe 'buggy' was a bit of an overstatement.

On top of all this, C# is a very easy language to use, so long as you understand the OOP paradigm, with more-friendly libraries (in my opinion) than Java, which is the most similar language I can think of.

Well, honestly I didn't understand OOP until I started working in Java. I tried C# before that, so I did have a hard time. Maybe if I were to use it now Id understand. However, I don't find Java libraries to hard to use. They are rather simple if you ask me.

[.NET] only really runs on four platforms - Windows, Linux, OSX and Windows Mobile.

If by Linux and OS X you mean through Mono, yes that's true, however I dont think its limited to those four. It's open source so it can be adapted to run on as many systems as Java can run on, like BSD or Solaris.

I dont have any doubts in C#. I'm sure its as productive as any other language out there. Im only going by my experiences with it, which are (now that I think about it) arent that much since I only spent about a month trying it out, and as a novice at that.

[chunderbunny]

BTW, I believe more in older language since they have been tested and true in battlefield.

Yes! That's why i always program with punch cards in Fortran 66.

You may joke but I have program at work which was originally written in Fortran 4. Conversations in my office sometimes go along the lines of:

"Hey, did you know that feature X is broken in your code?"

I stare at them blankly.

"Are you going to fix it?"

Me: "No."

Seriously, in order to save memory it stores all variables at different indexes of the same array.

[LVUER]

Well, I don't mean that old.
COBOL is good but I never want to touch it ever again. One small mistake and you get a whole bunch screen of error messages.

Pascal, C, C++, PHP are among those I trust. I never use Phyton hence I ask the question. But Phyton is quite old (PyTom said that it created in 1991) so I think it's good since it's been around and used for quite a long time.

[Sin]

I've programmed for years and years and I've tried different languages.
The one thing that really annoys me with a language like python is how it treats whitespace.

I'll just say it out loud: I like squigglies. Now I know this probably seems petty and expected from a C++-programmer like myself.

Even though there's no apparent way to specify code blocks in python, it's still there because you need to indent every line correctly or the code breaks, or worse, it doesn't break but doesn't do what you expect it to do.
In C/C++ you use "squigglies" ({, }). In Delphi/Pascal you use begin and end.

[PyTom]

Well, it's really indentation rather than whitespace in python. Indentation is the only place where whitespace is significant in python.

I think the argument for it is that all good code (at least in C, C++, Java, and C#) is indented properly. It's very easy to be misled by code like:

Code: Select all

    if (*a != *b);
    {
        return true;
    }

which returns true all the time. For an experience programmer, indentation-based block structuring probably doesn't hurt much, and it saves about a line per block.

That being said, I think that going with significant indentation is probably the biggest mistake I made in the design of Ren'Py. Many Ren'Py programs are written by inexperienced programmers, and significant indentation makes the language harder to teach and learn. (I'm not sure there's a good way to fix it, especially since we allow embedded python.)