My experience with Python
During the last 5 months, I have been learning Python. I read a few books about the language and subscribed to various mailing lists, RSS feeds and followed Open-Source projects.
Learning Python was easy and interesting. My experiences with programming languages so far have been mostly with PHP (since 1999), Objective-C, some C, Javascript and Actionscript for Flash. So I was at ease with Python and everything seemed well thought and designed.
Compared to PHP, Python is pretty. Even the syntax is prettier. The obligatory code indentation is in my opinion an excellent idea to make sure your code is readable and respects some coding standards. Compare this with the code you can find in PHP apps libraries where each script has its own way...
Python seems to have been thought from the start. On the other hand, features were added to PHP one after the other in order to "solve the web problem". So compared to Python, PHP looks like an ugly fat blob. It borrowed from C, Perl, Java, C++... In comparison, Python looks more like a nice girl in a pretty dress. But as Rasmus Lerdorf said, PHP was never designed to win a beauty contest.
I started learning Python mostly because I was getting bored with PHP. I write PHP code almost every day, 10 hours a day, so I wanted to try something new. I had to do it on my extra time since PHP is our language of choice at work. I picked Python instead of Ruby because I didn't want to follow the hype around Rails. I was also interested in projects like Python for Series60 from Nokia and pyObjC, a bridge between Python and the Cocoa framework.
As my work consists mainly in writting web application, my first attempts with Python were to see if I could also use it for the web. Well, the answer is not definitive but it's closer to no. Python is not ready for the web. The community is working hard on web frameworks but they go in every directions and none of them is well tested. And none of them is near PHP in terms of ease of use, features and deployement options.
Still, I really wanted so I picked up a simple web framework called Colubrid and tried to find a template engine that would fill my needs. In the past I have been using HTML_Template_Sigma and was after something as simple. Well, without success. There are a lot of template engines in Python but they are either too big and do easy thing the hard way, or they are too simple and don't support the basic stuff you would expect. So I decided to simply port HTML_Template_Sigma to Python.
In a way, I managed. My version supports everything that HTML_Template_Sigma supports. It took me 2,5 days approx. But the experience made me see how a language that tries to win the beauty contest is limited compared to its ugly brother. Here are some of the problems I met:
- No isset(). If you use a variable that is not bound to an object, Python raises an exception, even if it's in a comparison clause. And you have no way prior to this exception to check whether the variable was bound. Some people suggest to catch the exception... This is like the chicken and egg problem.
- Too many array types. PHP has only one type of array even if it can be used in different manners. Whether it is associative or not, the PHP arrays share the same set of funtions. In Python, you get dictionaries, tuples, lists, etc. And they don't have the same API. Arrays are probably the most useful way to store information in my code, with Python I always have to remember which kind of storage I used.
- Values added to dictionaries are not stored in any specific order. Dictionaries are like associative arrays. Except that when you iterate them, the items you carefully added to them are listed in no specific order. This makes them totally useless and even dangerous. And there are no other datatypes provided by default to take care of your data in an ordered way. You have to write your own.
- No easy one liners. I use a ? a : b; quite a bit in my code since it makes it shorter and easier to read (at least for me). You can't do something as simple in Python, you have to use convoluted ways.
There are a lot of other things in Python I felt were missing or wrong compared to PHP. The opposite is also true, but I mostly do web development and in this area PHP is way beyond. I agree that Python is a prettier language but that's not enough. Beauty is a subjective thing and to stay pretty you have to stay slim. I expect a language to provide me with the tools and the syntax to be as productive as possible, eventually with less code.
Actually, a lot of Python users seem to be in love with their language. They even invented a silly word to define and label other people's code : "pythonic" and "not pythonic". It means pretty. For example, interfaces, from Java or PHP5, are not pythonic. I actually got amused by the number of things that were not pythonic.
"Pythonic" is a geek term. In fact, I think Python is a language for geeks. The majority of Python users have no idea about marketing, business, promotion, press, corporate... Commercial terms are dirty. Python programmers like concepts and programming challenges. Python is their playground, their moment of fun, their hobby. There are actually a very little number of Python developers that seem to use the language for their living. Python is often used for prototyping and testing concepts.
I am not a geek and what I am really after is a tool to help me get more productive at work. Unfortunately, Python didn't fill my needs. I was happy to learn it and it showed me some interesting concepts implemented in interesting ways. Now I can read and write Python code that is maybe not "pythonic" but that does the job. Thanks to my initiation, I also discovered Mercurial, a very good RCS written in Python and switched to it from Subversion. I didn't loose my time, I simply had to try.
Now I am learning Ruby and enjoying it so far. It seems to fit the bill, along with Rails as a potential replacement to PHP. There is also an Objective-C/Cocoa bridge called RubyCocoa. Nothing for the Nokia Series 60, but this will force me to use my new Python skills so it's ok. In terms of beauty, I think Ruby won the contest over Python a long time ago. I will report about my experiences with Ruby later on.