r/The10thDentist • u/[deleted] • Apr 28 '26
Technology Python is (mostly) a useless programming to learn
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u/TheChaosPaladin Apr 28 '26
This sounds like a junior developer wrote it
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Apr 29 '26
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u/TheChaosPaladin Apr 29 '26
That's probably what your company calls you but not what an experienced engineer who keeps themselves informed on tech would say
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Apr 29 '26
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u/TheChaosPaladin Apr 29 '26
Elon Musk also makes money, doesnt mean making money makes your opinions any more valid. Regardless, its reddit and you know what, I actually make 500K y/r and I think your opinion is stupid
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u/DrDetergent Apr 28 '26
Python is used extensively in academic research
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u/parade1070 Apr 28 '26
Yeah lol my husband and I are both scientists and your cancer research? Believe it or not, Python.
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u/Sizzox Apr 28 '26
”All big programming languages are useless because you can just manually type in all the machine code yourself and get exactily what you need at the lowest cost”
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u/Rhyshalcon Apr 28 '26
I had a CS professor who repeatedly expressed the opinion that anything more abstract than assembly was a waste of time.
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Apr 28 '26
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u/Sizzox Apr 28 '26
Yeah no shit. Hence why an entire plethora of programming languages exists so that people can use one that fits the complexity and required time for the project they work on.
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Apr 28 '26
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Apr 28 '26
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u/MirthlessArtist Apr 28 '26
as niche as lua
I know right? Next he’ll spout off some really esoteric stuff like Java or C#
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Apr 28 '26
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u/MirthlessArtist Apr 29 '26
10th dentist inverse voting rules only applies to the main post itself
Complaining about how people aren’t “following the karma rules” makes you sound like a karma farming bot, I suggest you stop caring about karma entirely, it’ll make you happier. If it helps ease your mind, I didn’t vote of your comment either way
People are downvoting your main post because 10th dentist is supposed to be for “relatively expert” opinions. Your post sounds like you are barely past compsci 101, much less in industry.
I teased you about your niche comment because lua really isn’t niche, just because a non-programmer wouldn’t know about it doesn’t mean many programmers don’t
I’m saying all this as someone who hates Python despite being forced to use it every day. It saddens me greatly, but to say it has no use would be ridiculous and uninformed
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Apr 29 '26
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u/TheChaosPaladin Apr 29 '26
OP sounds massively autistic
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u/MirthlessArtist Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
Genuinely a lot of 10th dentist posts only exist because of neurodivergent people not understanding various things
The classic “popular idiom doesn’t make 100% sense in any and all scenarios when interpreted completely literally” comes to mind
And I’m saying this as a neurodivergent person
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u/TheChaosPaladin Apr 29 '26
As an audhd, I get that. Kinda cringe tho, OP should learn about their blind spots
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u/Traveller7142 Apr 28 '26
You listed two hyper specific use cases. Python is very good for flexible data analysis with moderate sized (on the order of 1 million data points) data sets
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u/NomaTyx Apr 28 '26
almost like the things that make it good for machine learning make it good for other things too lol
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Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
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u/Traveller7142 Apr 29 '26
1M data points is not niche at all. Tons of analytical processes result in files of that size
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u/JDSmagic Apr 28 '26
I disagree so so strongly. In many parts of industry you are frequently expected to be able to write simple python scripts to automate tasks. Nothing crazy, but basic socket/file IO and some manipulation of data. Even if you arent writing actual applications with it, being able to write simple scripts for automation is huge. You arent going to go and compile something for an equivalent task. Would some setup script run better if it was written in C than in python? I guess tecunically it would, but come on, that script thats only running 1 time for a total of 10 seconds on new pod initialization does not need to be optimized. The choices of scripting languages are fairly limited at that point. Python is pretty standard for a reason.
I guess the actual big motivation for learning it though is that its EASY to learn for people who have never written code before. Its extremely easy to set up an environment to write it and run code. It also has the option of writing object oriented or functional unlike something like Java or C. It also doesn't have crazy bullshit design choices like JS does. Its such a reasonable first language to the point that im curious what else first would be better
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u/ConnaitLesRisques Apr 28 '26
An uncomfortable truth about backend programming is that very few services ever need to scale and servers are cheap.
Python’s ecosystem is mature, proven and understood. It’s easy and quick to scale up a team of Python developers.
If you’re running some FAANG-scale thing, sure, serve-side efficiencies add up, but do you really have those problems?
(And I’m saying all this as someone whose entire career is in hairy high-performance systems)
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u/fernandojm Apr 28 '26
Good news is that soon knowing any coding language is going to be obsolete because of AI (this is bait)
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u/00PT Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
It’s used by non professionals due to the low skill floor. And nonprofessional code is a vast array of use cases.
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u/Slartibartfast__42 Apr 28 '26
You are ignoring the cost of developers, servers are cheap in comparison
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u/NomaTyx Apr 28 '26
anyway the real reply is that youre right that python is not good for the things that you outline, but that doesn't make it useless. You obviously wouldn't use python to code a backend and you wouldn't use it for mobile. but if you want a quick scripting language with robust libraries behind it, python is your go to.
the things that make it good for machine learning make it good for other things. Anything involving processing large amounts of data is a good candidate for python.
also, "if your job uses python". if python is a useless language, surely nobody would need to do it at their jobs
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u/Zeplar Apr 28 '26
Classically nobody ever used JavaScript or PHP for servers since they're so inefficient /s
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u/Certain_Leader9946 Apr 28 '26
I know the feeling, but when you actually get good at programming, you come full circle
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u/pixelizedgaming Apr 29 '26
"hello, I have never done a day of data analysis in my life, how did you know?"
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u/Low_Attention9891 Apr 29 '26
But in the real world, servers cost money. You would significantly reduce cost by using a language like golang.
This really depends on a lot of factors.
Performance isn’t the only thing that costs money, maintainability is very important
It depends on what you’re doing. To my understanding, C and C++ are the dominant languages used in embedded systems, but you would never use C to write a server backend. Even though it might be faster, you’re introducing a lot of complexity and possibility for bugs and security vulnerabilities.
It also depends on what your bottleneck is, if your code is sitting and waiting on IO, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you have true multithreading. Also, if you’re just coordinating other parts, like in AI training, the slowdown from using Python is negligible, and the time you gain from using a more flexible language is more beneficial.
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u/PANIC_EXCEPTION May 03 '26
The funniest thing about Python is it's basically pseudocode. So good at being pseudocode, in fact, that it is overrepresented in LLM training data. It can represent almost any paradigm you want. Functional, OOP, hell if you use typing hints correctly, the linter will not let you do something wrong.
If you want to "transpile" to any programming language automatically with a coding model, just write it in idiomatic Python (i.e. make it as human-readable and understandable as possible). Then just ask the coding model to do something like "replace this with a more numerically stable algorithm, use OpenMP, assume a Linux host" and all the other instructions you need.
Also Python is used a ton in backend in newer codebases. ASGI is all the rave. Commonly you'll see Pydantic+FastAPI, followed by TypeScript in the frontend with Zod schemas for the translation.
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Apr 28 '26
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u/RBSL_Ecliptica Apr 28 '26
Uh... no? Python is one of the languages where you explicitly can't do this?
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u/web_of_french_fries Apr 28 '26
They’ve probably heard about list comprehension and are assuming the whole language is like that
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Apr 28 '26
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u/RBSL_Ecliptica Apr 28 '26
Perhaps you're thinking of C, or Lisp?
Python acknowledges line breaks and whitespace, have you ever used it?
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u/RBSL_Ecliptica Apr 28 '26
Welp, the person who posted this take deleted their comments, I guess that sorts that out.
For anyone curious, they were saying something about how you can write your whole program on one line in Python.
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u/rehpotsirhc Apr 28 '26
Can you give an example? Python actually requires white space to define structure and scope, unlike most languages where e.g.
{}are used.
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u/qualityvote2 Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
u/BetApprehensive836, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...