[python-advocacy] discussion about Python weaknesses

[Paul Boddie]

On Thursday 20 January 2011 18:35:05 Brad Allen wrote:
> oops, sent this under the wrong subject header...

[...]

> At the office today someone circulated this criticism of Python to all
> our employees...
>
> 
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-weaknesses-of-Python-as-a-programming-language

What really needs saying? One doesn't get far into the most "upvoted" comment 
from Jesse Tov before tripping over inaccuracies and, eventually, falsehoods 
("Python is untyped"), the latter explained away in the subsequent discussion 
with sentiments approximating to "I don't care to learn the terminology 
everyone else uses, so I'll just use my own instead".

As always, I get the impression that the average vocal and overly 
self-confident critic of Python is a Lisp hacker with a chip on their 
shoulder. I don't see what nested scopes have to do with object-oriented 
programming - indeed, having objects removes some pretty significant 
motivations for wanting things like closures, which I seem to recall were one 
of the primary motivations for the lobbying for nested scopes in Python, 
coming mainly from Lisp people, apparently - so maybe everything has to be 
linked back to nested scopes and closures if one is a Lisp hacker.

The bit about hash tables and attribute access is something I've probably 
mentioned on this list before: some people do worry about the 
efficiency/performance. But by that point in the above comment, one should 
probably have stopped reading already.

Paul