Python is Weird
10:09 PM EDT Wednesday, September 20 2006
I've heard some good things about the Django framework. One thing that as me interested in Django is that the way it works in general is you define your domain model in code, in Python objects, and Django figures out how to build a database for you. Conceptually, I like this idea better than Ruby on Rails, where you define your domain model in the database, and then rails generates objects for you at runtime based on the database metadata. Also, you run it my installing mod_python in apache. Again, compared to rails with apache, FCGI/SCGI, lighttpd, mongrel, etc..., I don't know, let's just say I have found the process of setting up a rails production web/app server challenging. I haven't done it for Django yet, we'll see. Should be a small memory footprint too, making it easy to run multiple apps in my 192MB virtual server webhost.
But one thing I want to comment on now is that I find Python to be weird. Maybe this is because I have done most of my programming in Java, but when I started to learn Ruby, everything in Ruby just made sense, without Java's stupidity, such as NullPointerExceptions and primatives. I've soured on rails recently, but I miss Ruby. The language is succinct and powerful, it almost feels like writing psuedo code, except that it actually works.
Anyway, let me just give a few examples of python weirdness. But before I do, let me say this. I don't know python well at all. Consider these statements to be my first impressions of Python. I'm in no way stating that python is poor language due to these oddities, they just strike me as odd and I feel the need to express it. So, on with the weirdness:
So to get started, I started reading the Django install guide. I noticed I needed python 2.3 or higher. Fair enough, so python 2.5 is the latest, so I installed that.
The next requirement is for MySQLdb. It says it works with python 2.3-2.4, doesn't say anything about 2.5. I decide to install python 2.4 to be safe. So just deciding which version of python to use is a little bit of a struggle.
So now I have python 2.4 and MySQLdb. I want to try and do something simple to verify it is working. I find an example in the docs:
import MySQLdb
db=MySQLdb.connect(passwd="moonpie",db="thangs")
c=db.cursor()
max_price=5
c.execute("""SELECT spam, eggs, sausage FROM breakfast
WHERE price < %s""", (max_price,))
What's with the 3 quotes? Anyway, let's give it a try. First, I add c:python24in to my path, fire up a command prompt, and enter "python" in hopes of getting an interactive shell. Python isn't found. Why not, because the python executables aren't in c:python24in, they are in c:python24. Ok fine, I fix my path, but I decide to use the IDLE GUI instead. I try to enter a query, but I make a typo. I press the up arrow, but it doesn't bring up my previous command. I re-type it and get it right this time. The query is:
select count(*) from users
This returns 9 when I execute the query in mysql. What does Python return?
1L
1L? What is that? Again, I am naive when it comes to python, this is not a fair criticism of Python, I have done very little to learn the language at this point, I just trying to illustrate a point. I know Java well. When I started learning Ruby, from the start, everything just worked as you expected it would. As I look into Python, I find one oddity after another. I'm sure if you know Python well you will consider many of the things in Java odd, so I'm just going to consider all of these things first impressions and move on to learn more about the language and give it a fair chance. But Python is still Weird.
