This is blasphemy, this is madness!
Gabor Ratky
CTO at Secret Sauce Partners
This is PYTHON!
Secret Sauce Partners
What have I learned this summer?
I've learned Python
Why?
- Provide guidance and better code review feedback to our Data team
- Python is the de facto standard language for data*
- Languages unlock the whole ecosystem around them, including documentation, frameworks, tooling
- For fun and profit
*wrangling, munging, analytics, science
How?
- Read the amazing Python documentation (Library Reference, Language Reference)
- Read Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho
- Installed PyCharm
- Started writing code that uses frameworks (luigi, pyspark)
- Started a pet project (CLI using prompt-toolkit)
What do I think?
Python is pragmatic
- Python sacrifices language purity for practicality
- There is an agreed upon convention for everything in the form of PEPs
-
From PEP 20 - The Zen of Python:
- There should be one- and preferably only one -obvious way to do it
- Explicit is better than implicit
- Simple is better than complex
- Complex is better than complicated
- Readability counts
- Conventions and good practices take away the guesswork around how to do things
Python ecosystem is great
- Python documentation is amazing (both stdlib and libraries)
- There is a library for EVERYTHING
- PyPI, pip & setuptools, virtualenv is more complicated than Rubygems and Bundler (but well documented)
- Integration with Java through Py4J (Spark), Jython (OpenRefine)
How about Ruby?
- Ruby's killer framework was Rails (later rack, rspec)
- Python's killer frameworks are NumPy, Pandas, Scikit (but also Django, Flask)
- The languages are not that different
- Python(ic code) is explicit, Ruby is more magic
- Python innovates slower, Ruby moves faster
- Python is rooted in academia, Ruby is web focused
"I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python. That's why I decided to design my own language."
gabor@secretsaucepartners.com