10 problems with Elisp, part 10

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2024 at 7:30 AM
> From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>
> To: "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>
> Cc: "Emanuel Berg" <incal@dataswamp.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: 10 problems with Elisp, part 10
>
> Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> writes:
> 
> > It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
> > have had a prior exposure to Python, as potential programmers they are
> > mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
> 
> Having learned Scheme after learning Python, I strongly disagree — both
> to your point and to your ugly portrayal of people.
> 
> You point: Python helps to understand Scheme because it provides
> fundamentals to structure reasoning. To separate concerns. To test with
> low overhead. To access data in common formats. To do the task you care
> about instead of adhering to ceremony. Going from Python to Scheme isn’t
> hard. suggest reading "The Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland":
> http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/scheme/
> 
> Your portrayal: this dehumanizing language has no place in a discussion.
> Badmouthing people does a disservice to any point you want to make.

Telling one they are wrong is considered dehumanising in universities these 
days.
 
> > In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just
> > to be sure. Today they stick to Python, so that they can share each
> > other's programs, bugs included.
> 
> Replace "Python" with whatever programming language they use.
> 
> If you think, Physicists do not share C++ code, or matlab code, or (yes)
> Fortran-code, where did you get this notion? Did you work with them?
> (I did)
> 
> Did you read code of large weather models?
> 
> Meteorologists who prove the deviations of a model down to phase shifts
> before they write the first line of code (do you do that before you
> write a program?) are still happy to share code. They know what they get
> and what they share.

Meteorologists cannot predict the weather.  No matter how clever they think 
they are.  Natural disasters cannot be predicted either.  And more than
half of mathematics papers have mistakes.

> Theoretical meteorology (at least in a faculty that works with that) is
> an eye-opener for how primitive software development of typical business
> software often is (this is not derogatory: business software has other
> main challenges, like staying maintainable in the face of constantly
> changing requirements).
> 
> Physicists who write a Python tool and then add a Cython part compiled
> to C to get native performance and who test this in detail against
> different existing tools using multitudes of parameters and datasets
> will still happily share code.
> 
> Physicists who write a Python model that binds complex atmospheric
> transport Fortran code know what they do: they keep the
> non-performance-critical parts in Python, because that enables them to
> spend more time on the actually critical parts.
> 
> Don’t go badmouthing other people.

We immediately found the audience psychically incapable of accepting truths
Dr. Babenhauserheide !
 
> The disdain spread among software developers against Fortran caused me
> to lose a lot of time during my PhD until I finally understood how
> misguided it is.
> 
> Please don’t repeat that mistake with Python.

My mistake was trying to use Python written by others.  I do not use it
and I reject it. 
 
> Best wishes,
> Arne
> -- 
> Unpolitisch sein
> heißt politisch sein,
> ohne es zu merken.
> draketo.de
>