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I mean by useless is it's so slow you can't make games or even big projects for GUI, only you can do is AI/ML, Data Science, and basic stuff. I think Rust is better because of its speed and language capabilities?

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[-] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago

OP must be cold because he seems to really like flame wars

[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 28 points 1 week ago

Betteridge's law of headlines:

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no

[-] refalo@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Demonstrably false, there are many cases where the answer is yes... it's just that there's also a lot of no.

[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago

Obviously. It is, however, a good heuristic. The headlines that can be answered in the affirmative are very much in the minority

[-] refalo@programming.dev 0 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The headlines that can be answered in the affirmative are very much in the minority

Not according to several different studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#Studies

[-] Dookieman12@piefed.social 23 points 1 week ago

Saying one programming language is better than another is ignorant; it's like arguing a screwdriver is better than a wrench.

Each language has their strengths and weaknesses that make them better at some tasks and worse at other. Python's strength is ease of development. Performance isn’t a big concern if you just want to quickly develop the app you want.

Rust might be more performant, but if development takes twice as long and the app only runs once or a few times, that benefit is unrealized.

[-] username_1@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 week ago

Please point at the strengths of BASIC and Forth over, let's say, C++.

[-] anton 4 points 5 days ago

Forth is powerful while still being very easy to interpret. This makes it a great bootstrapping step.
It's also used as a scripting language in some embedded system, it might be telescopes but I'm not sure. While forth wouldn't be my first choice there, I don't want to be able to crashed the device because I have hot swapped in a binary, compiled with the wrong flags.

[-] Solemarc@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

You can finish learning basic or Fortran. You will still be learning cpp in a decade.

[-] CarlLandry357@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

"Python’s strength is ease of development"

That's what I usually see with Python. I think that's the reason people should choose it.

"Performance isn’t a big concern if you just want to quickly develop the app you want."

You're correct with that, but if your project is to make a touch screen app for fast food restaurant, now you're wrong because of Python's performance.

[-] Piatro@programming.dev 8 points 1 week ago

Python is very much "good enough" for that kind of environment. The touch screen drivers on the other hand, yes, should probably be rust/c.

[-] CarlLandry357@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I've heard C is used for this kind of stuff, maybe also rust.

[-] rimu@piefed.social 14 points 1 week ago

This is your second post about this and you got the same response last time.

Try a third post, maybe it'll go differently next time.

[-] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

…Have you tried ML projects in Rust?

I mean, ML/data science devs use Python because the bajillion underlying libraries and implementations are already there.

It’s not perfect. But that’s fine, because it’s a pretty good prototyping language for researchers, and anything performance sensitive is done in libraries anyway.


If you want a real world example, see: Mistral.rs vs vllm.

[-] socsa@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago

PyTorch in particular is literally just a dispatching front end for CUDA anyway. It's actually an incredibly powerful tool for GPGPU development, and you will struggle to make faster GPU DSP by hand.

People making these arguments are just incredibly out of date. You can basically use python to trace super optimized GPU compute kernels and then drop them into whatever language you want via torchscript, onnx, trt, whatever.

[-] TheMightyCat@ani.social 9 points 1 week ago

I don't like python personally, but saying its useless is quite far detached from reality considering all the python projects.

You can argue its slow and i would agree, but if people make alot of stuff with it its clearly not useless.

A programing language cannot be better than another one because its personal opinion.

[-] CarlLandry357@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

if people make alot of stuff with it its clearly not useless

You're correct, but we cannot avoid that it's limites to basic stuff, you can't make a facebook with pytho with good speed.

[-] Cricket@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

you can’t make a facebook with pytho with good speed

You may want to check your assumptions. Facebook's back-end was developed with PHP, probably because it was the most popular web back-end language when it was originally developed. However, two later Meta products, Instagram and Threads, used Python for their back-end. Source: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside-story-metas-newest-social-app/

[-] Solemarc@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

Pyrefly is a python type checker and it's made by meta. I doubt they'd be doing that if they weren't using python.

I mean I'm posting from PyLova (Python-based and it's been mostly good. I was truly skeptical of the viability of a Python-based Fediverse platform when PieFed first dropped, and I'm still skeptical of Python over Rust from a purely technical perspective, but it's been smooth sailing on this instance so far 🤷

[-] whats_a_lemmy@midwest.social 3 points 1 week ago

99.9999% of projects will never need to reach the scale of Facebook

[-] Cricket@lemmy.zip 3 points 5 days ago

Even if they do, Python still seems to do the job. Instagram and Threads use python for their back-ends: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside-story-metas-newest-social-app/

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 8 points 1 week ago

No. Next question.

(insert spongebob meme showing the fat dude a bunch of big python projects upon which many things run in this world)

[-] who@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago

you can’t make games or even big projects for GUI

Oh no? Someone should probably tell the people who made Eve Online.

they don't run the standard Python. because its unusably slow. Your examples proves the counterpoint

[-] who@feddit.org 1 points 6 days ago

No. They don't run the standard Python because they wanted to use coroutines before standard Python had coroutines. Your argument is misinformed.

[-] germanatlas 3 points 1 week ago

And plenty more games are mainly or partially using python like Civ 4, DDLC, World of Tanks or Guild Wars

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago

Yes. I dunno about Rust, but Julia is a very similar to Python but much better.

[-] CarlLandry357@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

But does anyone use Julia?

[-] KRAW@linux.community 2 points 1 week ago

It's very popular in scientific computing

[-] Feyd@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago

Python obviously isn't useless, but it is both slow, and if you're making serious software, the worst developer experience I've ever had to deal with. It makes the easy things easy and the hard things hard, so to speak

[-] AlphaOmega@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

No games? Mount and Blade was written in python

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

Was it though? Or is it like other things "written in Python" where all of the heavy work is handled by C libraries?

[-] Solemarc@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

I hate this argument on principal, if I write a game with Pygame, it's written in Python not C.

Balatro is written in Lua not C just because Love uses SDL.

This is like saying Python, CPP, JS, PHP, LUA, Perl, Dart, C# and Java are just written in C.

This is like saying Rust isn't a real language because it relies on LLVM which is written with C/CPP.

If I split the lua code in balatro from the SDL library, I don't have a game anymore.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 days ago

Why do you feel a need to be able to claim that something is "written in Lua" or "Python" when it's using native libraries? Many games are using a mix of languages these days. There's no shame in it and I didn't imply there is.

People get very confused over this thinking that "Python is very fast at number crunching" because of things like numpy which is written partly in C to achieve that performance.

This is like saying Rust isn’t a real language because it relies on LLVM which is written with C/CPP.

That's entirely different - I'm not talking about the interpreter or compiler. Just the runtime code.

[-] Womble@piefed.world 2 points 1 week ago

Python itself is just a program written in c, every time you do len(string) you are calling out of the python interpreter into compiled c code. The distinction between python wrapped c library and a python lib can be fuzzy.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago

That's not what I'm talking about. Things like "numpy" which are actually written with a fair amount of C for performance. Or pandas which uses Cython to trans-pile Python to C to compile.

It's not "pure python".

[-] leanleft@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

i think a key consideration is wether there are alot of developer for the lang.
a foss project will grow faster if its written in rust,js,cpp,python

this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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