Python - Warning Lessons

Over the last fortnight I've been dabbling with Python, the seemingly ubiquitous language seeping into every nook and cranny not containing a dedicated C++ follower, like myself.

Its on the Pi, its behind a lot of research work and big companies, like Google (before they worked on Go - lots of their stuff was Python, and perhaps still is).

So, I took a look... Its a powerful language, I don't doubt, it reminds me very much of writing procedural Pascal form the mid 1990's, but most importantly it looks like psuedo code, other authors mention this (http://www.jayconrod.com/posts/37/a-simple-interpreter-from-scratch-in-python-part-1) and others even crow about the syntax and structure being so simple.  But I hate it.

It leaves so many stones unturned, so many open ends, and I have to say it makes me cringe.

In C++ one has to definiately define the article of the body of a class, for example:

class Alpha

{

private:

int m_Value;

};

Now, the value of Alpha can only be set by functions which are part of this class, it is totally private:

class Alpha

{

private:

int m_Value;

public:

Alpha (const int& p_Value)

: m_Value (p_Value)

{

}

};

We can all agree this is a powerful tool, it lets us change and range and control the use of variables in the class, it can make our code safe and remove bugs, also the type of m_Value is implicitly defined one can't define m_Value and then start to point values at m_value by mistake, the compiler tells you to go away, this in my opinion is correct programming, I agree there's a lot of overhead (if you let the compiler create all that code) but there are far less potential bugs.

In Python we can get the same class:

class Alpha:

    def __init__(self,p_Value):

        self.m_Value = p_Value

And I find this abhorrently dangerous, first off, I didn't have to create "m_Value" the interpreter simply saw the name and invented it, if I then use "m_value" or any typo the interpreter does not thing, Ah hang on I don't know what this value is, it thinks "Ah a new thing to work with" and creates said typo as a new value.  Debugging such things is an utter nightmare.

Then the syntax itself, its clean, though not neat the reliance on tabbing to define structure annoys me.  I already have a big bee in my bonnet about different indentation styles in the C language family, so to see indentation made a part of the language, white space defining function, is scarey as hell.

But, Python is out there, and its a language I don't know an aweful lot about, so I'm learning it, gradually on the side.  Just you guys and gals out there learning it be very wary of its pit falls!