After a lifetime of programming and compsci education, I’ve had some issues learning with Python. It screws me up in small ways. It’s a wonderful language, but dear god I wish these things were different.

  • Missing the ++ operator.
  • Missing foo.push. I’ve spent my whole life being trained to use push() on lists, and now it’s just not there. This breaks a deeply-ingrained typing habit.
  • Seemingly random things are not object-oriented. Like len(foo) instead of foo.len(). Or type(foo) instead of something like foo._type().
  • I don’t know why tuples are needed. Not having to worry (too deeply) about immutable strings is one of the glories of modern programming languages. So why does Python need to use immutable arrays? I’d guess the answer is “optimization”, but that doesn’t seem to gel with the fact that we aren’t managing immutable strings.

Ridiculously minor issues:⌗

  • I have to modify two things to change import foo to from foo import bar. I wish I could just append text onto the end, like import foo specifically bar. Vi has made me lazy like that.