Python complaints

[Dan Schmidt]

Mark Carroll <markc at chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

| Basically, I'd be really interested to learn: what _don't_ people
| like about Python? Every language has things that many people
| complain about, however reasonably, or would like to have been
| different, and I'd be interested to know what Python's are so I can
| get an idea if any are going to annoy me, rather than me being
| confused then frustrated then disappointed about them as I discover
| them further in. For instance, I'm sure plenty of people would hate
| Modula-3's lack of implicit casting, need to define everything
| before using it, Pascal-style uppercase keywords, etc. Are there any
| ways that Python makes programming slightly more awkward than people
| would have liked?

The main thing I find frustrating is that lambdas are not very
powerful.  Much of the time that I would use a simple 'map {}' in
Perl, I find that I have to write a separate function, or iterate by
hand.  My understanding, though, is that there's no plan to make
lambdas more powerful, which is a bit disappointing to me.

Michael Hudson's bytecodehacks do ameliorate some of my problems with
trying to write in a functional style.  I hope they make it into the
standard library at some point.

-- 
Dan Schmidt | http://www.dfan.org