also I just realized that Brazil did NOT make a programming language entirely in Spanish and call it “Si” and that my professor was making a joke about C… god damn it
this post is probably too nieche but I feel like Lemmy is nerdy enough that enough people will get it lol
I’ll hate on python (or any dynamically typed lang) as much as the next guy, but let’s not be language snobs
Why would you hate on it? It has its usecases. You won’t build an OS in Python, but I’d much rather do data processing in Python than in C
I try to avoid python for two main reasons. While coding, white spaces. Who thought that was a good idea? While using, shared dependancies, again who thought thay was a good idea? I have to use pipx or manually make a venv otherwise python scripts start breaking each other. May as well just package it with its own dependancies from the get go.
I genuinely do not understand the problem with white spaces that people seem to have. Literally any well formatted code will use whitespace for indentation.
I imagine that if python syntax was the norm and then a C-style syntax language appeared, the same group of people would be complaining “curly brackets? Who thought that was a good idea?”
“Hold my beer” shouted the Tcl interpreter
These uh…aren’t issues you need to think about much.
Brazil did NOT make a programming language entirely in Spanish
Because we speak fucking portuguese
I’ve met more than one that thinks you speak Mexican
Maybe if we start saying Americans speak Americanese they’ll get the memo lmao
Sim
To start with Brazil speaks Portuguese not Spanish
C is too cold. Python is too hot. What is just right?
Nim. Python-esque way to write, C speed
Visual Basic.
I’ll be honest, I think modern python is cool. You just need to accept that it has some limitations by design, but they mostly makes sense for its purpose.
It’s true that the type system is optional, but it gets more and more expressive with every version, it’s honestly quite cool. I wish Pylance were a bit smarter though, it sometimes fails to infer sum types in if-else statements.
After a couple large-ish personal projects I have concluded that the problem of python isn’t the language, but the users.
On the other hand, C’s design is barren. Sure, it works, it does the thing, it gives you very low level control. But there is nothing of note in the design, if not some quirks of the specifications. Being devoid of innovation is its strength and weakness.
As someone who studied C exclusively in school and used it for the majority of programming projects I had in the real world, coming to Python now is like moving from a kit car like a Caterham to a Mercedes S class.
Knowing nothing about code but a fair bit about cars, does that analogy mean like, you can play around with a kit car all you want because you built it, it’s relatively simple, and if you break it you’ll know why and how to fix it, and the Mercedes being the exact opposite?
C does one thing really well and that’s everything fast with complete control. Python is cool for people just trying to bang out some scripts or learning to program but interpreted languages have no place in mainstream software. Devices are starting to become slower than computers 30 years ago because there is so much garbage being included in apps written in interpreted java and Python and other nonsense. It’s not just bad for the user but it’s bad for the planet. It shouldn’t take a million times the energy to run a simple program because someone doesn’t know how to write in a proper language. Python is okay for some things. The world has become too reliant on it though. Also just for purely selfish reasons if you are the type. Interpreted languages kill your battery life and ram and stuff. Modern android phones besides all their problems with Google ruining them like Microsoft are also just becoming incredibly slow and stupid. You can barely even open two apps without most android phones panicking and closing apps to save memory. A calculator app is 100 MBs now. The phone feels like it’s going to catch on fire when you open a notepad.
I like many of your points, but your comment is facetious.
You said it yourself, “it’s good for someone trying to bang out scripts”… and that’s it, that’s the main point, that’s the purpose of python. I will argue over my dead body that python is a trillion times better than sh/bash/zsh/fish/bat/powershell/whatever for writing scripts in all aspects except availability and if that’s a concern, the only options are the old Unix shell and bat (even with powershell you never know if you are stuck ps 5 or can use ps 7).
I have a python script running 24/7 on a raspberry that listens on some mqtt topics and reacts accordingly asynchronously. It uses like 15kiB (literally less than 4 pages) of ram mostly for the interpreter, and it’s plenty responsive. It uses about two minutes of CPU time a day. I could have written it in rust or go, I know enough of both to do it, it would have been faster and more efficient, but it would have taken three times the time to write, and it would have been a bitch to modify, I could have done it in C and it would have been even worse. For that little extra efficiency it makes no sense.
You argue it has no place in mainstream software, but that’s not really a matter of python, more a matter of bad software engineers. Ok, cool that you recognise the issue, but I’d rather you went after the million people shipping a full browser in every GUI application, than to the guys wasting 10 kiB of your ram to run python. And even in that case, it’s not an issue of JavaScript, but an issue of bad practices.
P.S. “does one thing well” is a smokescreen to hide doing less stuff, you shouldn’t base your whole design philosophy on a quote from the 70s. That is the kind of shit SystemD hater shout, while running a display server that also manages input, opengl, a widget toolkit, remote desktop, and the entire printer stack. The more a high profile tool does, the less your janky glue code scripts need to do.
Python is okay for some things. It’s just that software in general has become terrible because there is so much wasted power being used because people have access to fast hardware. In the 90s your entire environment would use a few MBs of ram. I know with high res images some of this stuff would increase but people are so wasteful with how they write stuff these days. We are evolving backwards because we spend hundreds or thousands on amazing hardware only to have it run like trash in a world where everything is written in java and python and electron. No longer do developers optimize. They just get their webpage to run at a inconsistent 30 FPS on your $2000 computer, and collect their 150k salary, on a machine that has more computing power than every computer in the world put together in the 90s.
It’s not just bad for your time and sanity. It’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for the economy, this same rot is working it’s way into operating systems, into game engines. Every game written for UE5 seems to run at 50 FPS regardless of how good your PC hardware is because of these same low quality programmers and terrible tools. Idk Linux to me has been a breath of fresh air in recent times as bad as it can be. It’s mostly C code with tiny binaries that are like 1-3 MB usually. I guess there is a silver lining to it in that all of these evil corporations like Google and meta and apple are dying because of this. Maybe the internet will go back to being centered around user content in a distributed fashion and not just a couple of highly controlled websites that try to brainwash you into supporting your corporate backed government. It already seems like every triple A game studio sucks and all the best games that have come out in the past 15 years have been from small indie studios.
Have you heard of the term “Software crisis”?
We don’t really talk all that much about it any more, because it’s become so normal, but the software crisis was the point where computers became faster than human programmers. That problem came up in the 1960.
Up until then a computer was simple enough that a single human being could actually understand everything that happened under the hood and could write near-optimal code by hand.
Since then computers doubled in performance and memory every few years, while developers have largely stayed human with human performance. It’s impossible for a single human being to understand everything that happens inside a computer.
That’s why ever since we have tried optimizing for developer time over execution time.
We have been using higher-level languages, frameworks, middlewares and so on to cut the time it takes to develop stuff.
I mean, sure, we could develop like in the 90s, the tools are all still there, but neither management nor customers would accept that, for multiple reasons:
- Everyone wants flashy, pretty, animated things. That takes an ungodly amount of performance and work. Nobody is ok with just simple flat unanimated stuff, let alone text-based tools.
- Stuff needs to run on all sorts of devices: ARM smartphones, ARM/x86 tablets, ARM/x86 PCs, all supporting various versions of Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and preferrably also Linux. But we also need a web version, at best running on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. You could develop all of these apps natively, but then you’d need roughly 20 apps, all of them developed natively by dedicated experts. Or you develop the app on top of browsers/electron and have a single app.
- Stuff needs to work. Win95-level garbage software is not ok any more. If you remember Win95/98 fondly, I urge you to boot it up in a virtual machine some time. That shit is unacceptably buggy. Every time the OS crashes (which happens all the time) you are playing russian roulette with your partition.
- Did I mention that everything needs to be free? Nobody wants to pay for software any more. Win95 was $199 ($432 in 2025 money) and Office was $499 ($1061 in 2025 money). Would you pay 1.5k just for Win11 and the current office?
So there’s more and more to do with less and less time and money.
We can square that circle by either reducing software quality into nothingness, or by using higher-level developer tools, that allow for faster and less error-prone develoment while utilizing the performance that still grows exponentially.
What would you choose?
But ultimately, it’s still the customer’s choice. You don’t have to use VSCode (which runs on Electron). You can still use KATE. You don’t have to use Windows or Gnome or MacOS. You can use Linux and run something like IceWM on it. You don’t have to use the newest MS Office, you can use Office 2013 or Libre Office.
For pretty much any Electron app out there, there’s a native alternative.
But it’s likely you don’t use them. Why is that? Do you actually prefer the flashy, pretty, newer alternative, that looks and feels better?
And maybe question why it feels so hard to pay €5 for a mobile app, and why you choose the free option over the paid one.
Uses less memory until it inevitably springs a memory leak. And its not a million times the memory, its ~10x. You should check out assembly language, it beats C in all the metrics you care about.
Assembly isn’t really faster than C in many cases, although it is in some cases, C actually compiles to assembly basically. The speed ups you get from assembly come from the fact that you can hand optimize some things that compilers miss, and it can be useful sometimes, like when writing a very high performance part of software like a game rendering loop or something.
Python uses 10x the memory but probably 100x-1000x the CPU cycles to do the same thing. Also using libraries written for interpreted languages is going to bloat your memory footprint where c libraries are tiny and efficient.
Memory leaks are an issue with all programming languages, although some use what’s called a garbage collector to handle memory which can be okay with some things but terrible in other things like real time software, operating systems, video games, or just anything you don’t want to hitch and lag and run like a turd. Garbage collectors aren’t some magic fix to memory management, if so they would be a part of C. There are huge tradeoffs to not managing your own memory. If you are using c with objects, then you are pretty safe. The object oriented nature of the language makes it very easy to manage memory. That’s mostly what it’s there for besides reducing the amount of redundant code, if you are using inheritance like you are supposed to. This is called a node graph. You store your data under objects so when you want to remove your data you just call a recursive free function on the highest parent object.
The difference really is that C code is efficient, in the sense that it doesn’t waste anything. Every thing that seems low level about C is there for a reason. It came from a time where it was important to write code efficiently. Where every MB and cycle counted. Where having a garbage collector freeing and potentially crashing your operating system was unacceptable as well as extremely slow. It’s still slow btw, because programs have scaled with the ability of hardware to run it, so garbage collectors are still mostly as terrible as they always have been.
C is only low level in the sense that it actually runs on the hardware. There isn’t layers of stuff in-between it and the hardware. There is no good reason to do so, outside of maybe security in some context. You don’t want web resources running on your hardware directly.
All the other stuff that comes with modern languages is mostly nonsense. Type checking is for lazy programmers. It multiplies the time needed to do an operation. There is no good reason for it to exist other than programmers being bad at their job. C is loosely typed btw. It checks types in the compiler where it belongs. If your android phone was written in c++, your battery would last for days, and you could play games on it for hours, and everything would be extremely fast, nearly instant loading of stuff. The reason web pages were written in JiT languages was mainly just for comparability across many different types of hardware and browsers. They were also relatively small programs. Scripting can be useful sometimes, garbage collectors can be useful for script kitty stuff. It has no place in mainstream software and definitely not in operating systems. Google went from “Don’t be evil” to let’s build an entire operating system out of java and spyware. It’s not good. At this rate we aren’t even going to have guis anymore in 10 years because no hardware will be able to run it without destroying itself, and needing to be plugged in constantly, and have $1000 worth of ram from some slave economy that has overpowered us as we have become so unproductive since most people are using windows 12 or some nonsense.
Python uses 10x the memory but probably 100x-1000x the CPU cycles to do the same thing. Also using libraries written for interpreted languages is going to bloat your memory footprint where c libraries are tiny and efficient.
You’ve obviously never looked at benchmarks because you’re one or two orders of magnitude off.
As someone who was trained in C and did most of my programming in it, yes it does everything you need but it’s a major pain in the ass doing it well. It’s slow to get things done and you need decades to get competent at it. Python allows you to get up and running a lot faster.
As cpu and ram are cheap compared to the days when C was a necessity, most programmers have made the decision that getting things going fast and easy was worth the trade off. The market has spoken. There is still a place for C or Rust, but there’s also a place for Python and other interpreted languages. You can make good programs in both but it’s a lot easier to make a garbage program in C.
Why would Brazil choose Spanish?
Brazil is a known Mexican Country, obviously they speak Spanish
Ridiculous. They’re in Latin America, so they speak Latin.
Ego puto in orto meo
Cuz Brazil speaks Spanish, duh. Not every country has English as their language, dummy
good ragebait 👌
Beigerate: kinda boring, but not bad.
Don’t they talk Mexican?
Factually, no
But don’t they use Portuguese?
What’s that? There’s English, French (aka weirdo Canadian), German (aka hate speech), Spanish (aka Mexican) and China
What are you on about?
Factually, yes (though quite distinct from its European counterpart).
From the 'Murican perspective? It’s all Mexico under the US.
C is the old carpenter, who can drive in nails with three strikes of the hammer and never forgets his tools.
C# is his friend who just uses power tools instead. He is fine too. He goes home early whenever he can.
Python is the new guy at work who thinks he’s super smart. He actually can do the job really well, but for some reason nobody likes him all that much.
Javascript is the boss’s son who got the job since he agreed to stay off pills but he does not. He is useful to be friendly with, maybe, but avoid him any day that you can. Typescript is his weird fiancée. She is significantly less stupid but much more rarely useful, and also best avoided.
Go and Rust are tight-knit friends who get shit done. They are extremely capable but also not friendly, they tend not to talk much.
Clojure does mushrooms on weekends, and seems to believe he has key insights the rest of the crew is too dim to understand, but he also makes frequent simple mistakes on the job and forgets things. Also avoid.
Java only has the job because he’s known the boss since they were kids. He was never that good, but now he is old, and frequently drunk. Avoid at all costs.
Nah java’s the super chatty guy who goes on and on and on and never aguts the hell up, making doing anything with him extra tedious
Python is from 1991. The only older language you listed was c.
Python is a millenial. He’s 34, is married and has two kids. But the old guys still think he’s 15.
COBOL handles the books because no one else can understand the system and it’s too much work to change after 40 years
C is the old carpenter with leaky memory with heavy undiagnosed autism, who constantly cracks demented jokes like “Missing } at end of file”.
He’s so mentally not there in fact, that if you don’t specifically tell him to return to you after finishing the job, he will neither figure out what he’s supposed to do, nor will he tell you what went wrong, but instead he will happily jump somewhere else, halucinate commands from the structure of the walls and start doing whatever the voices tell him to do.
In my analogy, the tool is the programming language, and the worker is the programmer in that language. Mostly.
In your analogy, only C and C# mention using specific tools, unless you count mushrooms as tools ;)
I mean yeah lol. That’s why I said “mostly.” But my point was, more or less, that modern power tools can do stuff that you simply can’t do with C, but C is still a venerable tool to me. I like it. The old pros can make fantastic custom cabinets, they do framing almost as fast as someone with a nail gun, it’s just that it’s not practical for most people to try to get skilled enough to be able to make solid stuff (and of course you can never make a skyscraper with just hand tools.)
Once you start finding yourself using malloc() all that much, you’re probably using the wrong tool, and it’s also just objectively less secure than other safer languages. But clean C code has a kind of beauty to me that is hard to replicate in the more powerful languages.
Rust is that one rare type of guy who refuses to round measurements so you end up with “the drawer is 28.34646 inches tall.”
Clojure one is perfect lmao.
Yeah and the new guy takes 3 days to finish the job that the old carpenter can do in 2hrs. And when he wants it done faster he quickly asks the old guy to do it for him. That’s why nobody else in the site likes him.
If you can eat it, then it’s edible.
Change my pythonic mind.
I genuinely don’t get it.
“The C programming language is like debating a philosopher and Python is like debating someone who ate an edible”
Here “edible” is a drug. it means Python is going in all and every directions like someone high on drugs.
That’s because it’s a stupid take. Believing brazil named a programming language after a Spanish word is pretty embarrassing too but I guess English speakers do that constantly.
'murica did send a president who made a toast to “the people of Bolivia”. During a dinner with the Brazilian president. In Brasilia. So, yeah, there’s precedent for their ignorance.
If that’s your bar…
Python is my “native” programming language, it’s the first I learned, and many of my leaps in understanding of the language have resulted from thinking “Wait, Python is a smart ass. I bet it can do…”
also I just realized that Brazil did NOT make a programming language entirely in Spanish and call it “Si”
Imagine Python did this, and people would programming in Dutch!
What about philosophers who eat edibles?
C++?
now we are asking the real questions.
If we’re continuing this analogy, did python or js take more drugs?
Python’s on edibles. JS is on a cocktail of every psychedelic known to man and has been continuously since 1995.
Don’t let Java try hallucinogens. It will get lost in the
public static void.
Who fucking cares use the tool you need.
