Python in use warning

[Kalvin]

I've never met a language that didn't have some form of perversity that needed working around.

I did quite a bit of PHP 3 through PHP 5 back in the day.  The magic quotes inanity, the oblivious approach to security... Ouch. 

Yeah, PHP is pretty horrible. But at least no one is trying to use it outside of generating dynamic web content. (That I know of anyway, because, you never know... )

Did you know that it is very handy to use PHP as a C/C++ preprocessor and code generator ... 

[SiliconWizard]

I've never met a language that didn't have some form of perversity that needed working around.

I did quite a bit of PHP 3 through PHP 5 back in the day.  The magic quotes inanity, the oblivious approach to security... Ouch. 

Yeah, PHP is pretty horrible. But at least no one is trying to use it outside of generating dynamic web content. (That I know of anyway, because, you never know... )

Did you know that it is very handy to use PHP as a C/C++ preprocessor and code generator ... 

Looks like I was right about the "you never know" disclaimer.

[T3sl4co1l]

PHP is proof that programmers are not, in fact, rational beings; and may be, in fact, to a sizable extent, masochists.

It's also proof that they can improve.  PHP6 or 7 as I understand it, has mostly ironed out the cruftiest of crufts.  Still tons of old code and applications floating around I'm sure, but it's progress at least.

Tim

[SiliconWizard]

PHP is proof that programmers are not, in fact, rational beings; and may be, in fact, to a sizable extent, masochists.

Many programming languages are proof of that, actually. I don't know if it as much masochism as it is exacerbated subjectivism.
Those "nasty" programming languages almost always originate in the mind of one programmer who subjectively created them with their own weird view of things. The masochist part is bunch of other programmers with a completely different mindset starting to flock to those languages. After which, popularity does the rest.

[T3sl4co1l]

Of which PHP is pretty much the case study of that; it was originally a bag of tricks used by one guy, who put it online, then other people started using it, expanding it... and the rest is history.  At least that's my understanding of it.  Don't know enough about other languages actually to think of other cases; most common languages were at least designed a little bit, AFAIK (e.g. Java was made to be portable, and reasonable enough to work in).

Or the counterexamples, which, I guess isn't so much "counter", as a generalization?  Some of those early languages designed by committee (Ada? FORTRAN? I forget which was the most notorious) could just as well be subjective with respect to to the committee as a whole.

Tim

[blacksheeplogic]

OP's issues are not related to Python as a language per se. There is a difference between Python as a language and Python's ecosystem(s) (with some poorly supported packages). Luckily there are lots of freely available, very well supported packages. Using these better supported packages is highly recommended. There is no reason to use unsupported or low-quality packages with broken dependencies.

Not every hardware platform is well supported, or supported at all. Also, many packages are released as "works for me", so there is no guarantee what so ever for maintaining these packages in future. But it is not the fault of Python as a language.

This plays a part as I only work with ARM but I've run into most problems since I've started to look at the desktops. I enjoy working with Linux on embedded ARM and I've spent many years working on Linux servers. But since starting to  looking at the client desktop it's been very painful.

I earn a large chunk of my income working in C# on Windows, although I dislike client side development it helps pay the bills and MSVS a pretty nice development environment. Sure it's not as customization as Linux but from a development perspective it's easier to work on. Maybe at some point I will come back to the Linux desktop but I can't afford to put the time into it right now. I'm not particularly interested in further developing a Linux client if I have to lock it down.