Yeah, it’s certainly not a perfect model :) and I will absolutely acknowledge that some folks seem to delight in their own smugness and knowledge and seem to enjoy opportunities to shit on someone. The way the platform works probably amounts to a certain “gravity” pulling those personalities in, TBH.
It’s mainly a different model, but I totally sympathize that it’s the opposite of welcoming or encouraging.
SO recognizes that many, many questions are really just rephrasings of the same underlying question, and the aim is to find and provide the best answer to those. It explicitly does not want to repeatedly answer the same question, and given how few people find out how it works before simply asking, they have to be pretty ruthless about it. The result is that usually the most active and fleshed out questions and answers are very informative. So there’s a big upside in trade for those downsides. Answers are meant to be durable, ~singular, and authoritative.
Reddit is basically halfway between that, and Discord. Discord is the polar opposite, questions and answers are naturally ephemeral, duplication happens constantly, and quality of responses is all over the map.
I greatly prefer the StackOverflow model, and - to be very clear - I have never once asked (to say nothing of answering) a question of my own there, lmao.
One tremendous strength of Python no one has mentioned is its vast ecosystem of high quality packages. It’s not just the language features that speed up development, that ecosystem makes a huge difference.
Another (far more subjective) advantage is readability - when written according to Python’s (actually quite opinionated!) style guidelines and general software engineering best practices, Python is also extremely readable, which really facilitates teamwork. My software shop has transitioned to using Python for most things these days for that reason, away from JS, after seeing my work and code reviews, FWIW.
I’m not some wizardly dev, to be clear, but I’m this shop’s first senior dev specializing in Python. I write deliberately clean and readable Python and folks are really enjoying it - enough to voluntarily switch.
Performance is always listed as a Python drawback, and it’s not untrue, it’s just so overblown as a problem. It basically never causes me issues. Crucially, saving dev time is almost always the better choice compared to saving compute cycles. And I’d take that farther and say anyone junior enough to be wondering about Python and performance…is almost certainly working on tasks that Python is well suited to - better suited, than most other languages.
(Hopefully this was not too controversial, but I accept the risk of a flame war, as is tradition lol)
Edit: clarity
Utterly tone deaf, some of these guys, it’s amazing. Had a new CEO open a meeting shortly after he started with a story about visiting an apiary (bee farm) with his family. His unironic takeaway which he shared with us, somehow missing the poignant relevance of what he was saying - “It turns out the drones just don’t do very much”.
It was like he intended an ice breaker with a personal anecdote, and it started out fine, but he couldn’t help but just tell literally all of us how he really feels. Amazing.
I like my genes pure, unmodified whatsoever - just the way they arise from the primordial soup.
'twas told to me that in many ways they refuse to cooperate with our system of taxonomy at large, too freaky to ever be properly pinned down
Just wanna say, great job on the feedback reception. Critically important (and often hard!!) skill, to get the value while leaving the ego-hit. If you handle criticism this well as a non-fulltime-dev, on a project you care about and that you have solo’ed - I have a feeling you have a lot of dev potential.
Whoops 😅
Nah, this seems like a big deal. Not necessarily “imminent doom for Twitter” big, but still. Social media platforms live and die on network effects, and none (that I’m aware of) has ever successfully “forced” their own viability without having naturally strong network effects.
Network effects work in favor of signups and engagement of course, but they work on the downswing too, they can accelerate abandonment and replacement.
There’s definitely some poor bastard who just naturally has this face and doesn’t deserve all this lmao
Jesus, famous pipe-layer
Yes, this one has tasted blood before. You can tell by the way that it is.
What do you do instead for dynamic values that are needed at runtime and inappropriate to check in to version control?
Sorry about the narrow urethra, Hank.
I really credit my present strength with Python, in at least a small part, to PyCharm. Really a great IDE for Python projects. It irritates me, if anything, how much more flexible VSCode can be for non-Python stuff. I end up using VSCode.