• 2 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • I’d actually argue Python stops people learning how to solve problems.

    I love teaching juniors and have done so for 10 years but I’ve noticed in the last 4-5 years since Python became the popular choice at universities Graduates aren’t learning anything about Static Types, Memory Management, Object Oriented Programming, Data Encapsulation, Composition, Service Oriented Architecture, etc…

    I used to expect most graduates to have a mixed grounding in those concepts and would find excuses for them to work on a small UI projects. I would do this as it gets them used to solving a small problem and UI’s give instant feedback. As Python became dominate university teaching language the graduates aren’t spending their time learning Typescript, Angular, HTML, etc… but instead getting overwhelmed by the concept of types.

    Those concepts I want them to learn were created to help make solving problems easier and each has their strengths and weaknesses but most graduates are coming through only knowing how to lay out a small amount of procedural logic using Python and really struggling to move beyond that.


  • QT is a cross platform UI development framework, its goal is to look native to the platform it operates on. This video by a linux maintainer from 2014 explains its benefits over GTK, its a fun video and I don’t think the issues have really changed.

    Most GTK advocates will argue QT is developed by Trolltech and isn’t GPL licensed so could go closed source! This argument seems to ignore open source projects use the Open Source releases of QT and if Trolltech did close source then the last open source would be maintained (much like GTK).

    Personally I would avoid Flutter on the grounds its a Google owned library and Google have the attention span of a toddler.

    Not helping that assessment is Google let go of the Fuschia team (which Flutter was being developed for) and seems to have let go a lot of Flutter developers.

    Personally I hate web frontends as local applications. They integrate poorly on the desktop and often the JS engine has weird memory leaks



  • It was a mixture of factors.

    Data was to be dumped into a S3 bucket (minio), this created an event and anouther team had built an orchestrator which would do a couple of things but eventually supply an endpoint a reference to a plain/txt file for analysis.

    For the Java devs they had to [modify the example camel docs.](https://camel.apache.org/manual/rest-dsl.html) and use the built in jackson library to convert the incoming object to a class. This used the default AWS S3 api to create a stream handle which fed into the OpenNLP docs. .

    The Python project first hit a wall in setting up Flask. They followed the instructions and it didn’t work from setup tools. The Java team had just created a new maven project from the Intelij but the same approach didn’t work for the Python team using pycharm. It lost them a couple days, I helped them overcome it.

    Then they hit a wall with Boto3, the team expected to stream data but Boto3 only supports downloading, there was also a complexity issue the AWS SDK in Java waa about 20 lines to setup and a single line to call, it was about 50 lines in Python. On the positive side I got to explain what all the config meant in S3.

    This caused the team anouther few days of delay because the team knew I used a 350MiB Samsung TV guide to test the robustness and had to go learn about Docker volume mounting and they thought they needed a stateful kubernetes service and I had to explain why that was wrong.

    Basically Python threw up a lot of additional complexity and the docs weren’t as helpful as they could have been.



  • You do, but considering the scales they process data I suspect Google would be better building Go tooling (or whatever the dominate internal language is).

    A few years back I was trying to teach some graduates the importance of looking at a programming language ecosystem and selecting it based on that.

    One of my comparison projects was Apache OpenNLP/Camel vs Flask/Spacy.

    Spacy is the go to for NLP, I expected it to be either quicker to develop, easier to use, better results or just less resources.

    I assigned Grads with Java experience Spacy and Python experience OpenNLP.

    The OpenNLP guys were done first, they raved about being able to stream data into the model and how much simplier it made life.

    When compared with the same corpus (Books, Team emails, corporate sharepoint, dev docs, etc…) OpenNLP would complete on 4GiB of RAM in less than a second on 0.5vCPU. Spacy needed 12GiB and was taking ~2 seconds with 2vCPU. They identified the same results…

    Me and a few others ended up spending a day reading the python and trying to optimise it, clearly the juniors had done something daft, they had not.

    It rather undermined my point.


  • My expectation is whatever the solution it needs to dockerise and be really easy to deploy via docker compose or Kubernetes so people can quickly and easily set up their own.

    The front end is effectively static files so I would probably choose Apache or Express (whichever gives me a smaller docker image)…

    For the backend I would choose Java for Spring Boot. An Alpine image with OpenJDK and the app is tiny. Spring has a library for every kind of interface making them trivial to implement but the main reason is hibernate.

    Hibernate (now Spring Data) was the first library for being able to switch out databases without having to change code (its all config). A lot of mastodon instances struggle with the resource requirements of elastic search so letting small instances use something like postgres would seem ideal.

    I have noticed Go/Rust still expect you to write or manage a lot of stuff Spring gives away for free. Python is ok if your backend is really tiny but there is a lot of boilerplate in how Python libraries work so complex projects get hard to manage and I assume interacting with the fediverse will add complexity.






  • You are far worse than the people you are claiming to act against.

    Lots of people can feel something is a problem and struggle to articulate it. So you have to take people on a case by case basis.

    OP talks about how they feel diverse characters are shoe horned in or badly written. Ask them to provide an example.

    When they can’t, then call them out. They are a bigot and deserve scorn.

    If they can provide an example, help them understand the issue and use appropriate language.

    Calling someone out who genuinely feels there is a problem doesn’t stop them feeling there is a problem. These people will go looking for some who acknowledges their feelings.

    Which is how you make a bigot



  • I wouldn’t get massively excited.

    Python is a scripting language, its shines when you want to write a stand alone file which takes an input and performs a task. Scripting languages are great to learn as a first language and so python is wonderful for non developers.

    The issue you hit is the build management solutions for Python are kind of broken and these help support and encourage good development practice so a lot of Python projects end up a collection of scripts rather than a mature project. You can have good projects but…

    In raw benchmarks Java has 90% of the performance of C/C++, but in reality Java is more performant because developers get bogged down in memory management on C/C++ and they get more time to optomise in Java as a result. I’m not sure where Rust will come out to be honest.

    Python benchmarks at 50% the performance of Java, in reality I’ve found code ends up slightly worse because Python is procedural, library support and streaming is poorly supported.

    Take library support, Spring really rose to prominese because of ‘hibernate’ which was a way to abstract talking to different databases through objects, you could switch from PostgreSQL to Oracle through config. Spring data has dumbed this down so I define a plain old Java object and Spring will generate everything I need.

    Python expects you to hand craft SQL statements and every database extends SQL slightly differently, so i need to write SQL for every operation and manage/own it. So the win in being able to quickly read/write to a database (since you don’t have to learn anything about Spring) is quickly ruined because of the all the boilerplate and error handling you now have to write.




  • See its the opposite in Linux land.

    AMD open sourced their drivers so everything just works, while Nvidia drivers have to be built against your system and Nvidia refused to supply proper desktop drivers for years (EGLStreams vs GBM).

    The downside of AMD’s approach is it has to trickle down which depending on what distribution you use can take weeks to a year and it normally takes a couple iterations to get everything working nicely. Which basically expect the 6800 XT to work brilliantly but the 7300 to be flakey for a bit.

    My favourite bit is I owned a few Athlon 5300 APU and 5 years after they were released AMD were still adding performance improvements to them.


  • If you click the link and follow it through 3 redirects you’ll get to Stamets post.

    Basically risa is listed as having “no rules” but the community admin is/was trying to moderate things to keep it “fun”.

    Stamets and others were upset at the contradiction and through there own posts generated alot of noise to get it resolved the startrek.website admin got sick of the drama.

    To be honest the site admin should require mods to accurately explain their actions “Doesn’t inspire Jahamora” isn’t a great reason and reading stamets examples I think you could build rules fairly easily.

    But I won’t be going to Ten Forward, reading the post was exhausting.


  • You seem to be intentionally missing the point, but to reiterate…

    You shower before entering a pool to wash the dirt from your body off (your cleaning yourself).

    The more of your body covered the less effective that shower is.

    Ideally everyone would be naked in the shower, but there are probably outfits which increasingly render the shower less and less effective (e.g. speedos are better than shorts, etc .).

    It would not surprise me if a Burkina covered so much that the cleaning shower is rendered pointless


  • The shower before a pool is to ensure people aren’t entering the pool coated in dirt (e.g. sweat, hair, dead skin, etc…).

    The chemicals in a pool are designed to bind to that dirt and kill any bacteria introduced.

    There is a limit to the chemicals you can add to a pool (before it hurts humans) and once the amount has activated you need to drain the pool and refill it.

    Swimming pools hold crazy amounts of water which is also really expensive to heat up, so pools want to do that as little as possible.

    Clothing interfers with cleaning your body, so people entering near fully clothed (e.g. like a Burkina) will likely introduce more dirt into the pool.

    That translates into increased costs for swimming pools or pools which maintain the old schedule and just operate unsafely.

    This is all based on owning a hot tub and learning how to maintain it.

    Hopefully this also explains why it doesn’t matter people enter the sea fully clothed