Why Python Sucks

written on Monday, June 11, 2007

And of course also why it sucks a lot less than any other language. But it's not perfect. My personal problems with python:

• It's dict and not Dict, it's list and not List and you cannot subclass them without overriding every method.......
• it's copy.copy and not just copy. Why in god's name is that an import?
• clean up the stdlib
• there is BaseHTTPServer and not py.http.baseserver or something like that. Why is that darn stdlib flat?
• there are soo many bad libraries in the stdlib and so many good ones not...
• no goddamn styleguide for the stdlib. it's UnitTest.assertEqual and not UnitTest.assert_equal like PEP 8 proposes
• By now you cannot reassign a variable from and outer scope. (there is a pep!)
• clean up the stdlib
• assignments are not expressions. gaaaaa. I want to do (foo |= []).append(42) and not foo |= []; foo.append(42) etc.
• No regexp literal and match objects are not instances of a Regexp class. Move the sre module into the core, add a @/foo/ literal and create a Regexp class instead of something like _sre.SRE_Pattern which you cannot import to make isinstance tests
• missing blocks. darn. i want blocks
• unify unicode and string. quick! (waiting for Python 3000)
• clean up the stdlib

Why it still sucks less? Good question. Probably because the meta programming capabilities are great, the libraries are awesome, indention based syntax is hip, first class functions, quite fast, many bindings (PyGTW FTW!) and the community is nice and friendly. And there is WSGI!

This entry was tagged python and rant