• 40 Posts
  • 1.77K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • Chais@sh.itjust.workstoProgramming@programming.dev•What's the point of Python if it's slow?
    71·
    2 days ago

    Assuming this is a genuine question and not just trolling.
    Python’s main feature, IMO, is that it’s easy to pick up. You don’t need to remember to put a semicolon after nearly every line, so you don’t need to remember which lines don’t need it. Basically you only need to remember to put a colon before an indented block.
    Thanks to significant whitespace even bad code will be moderately legible.
    Control flow and loops are basically written in plain English: for i in range(17): as opposed to e.g. for (int i=0; i<17; i++) {.
    This all reduces the mental load and thus leaves you with more capacity to focus on the task you’re trying to solve.
    It’s a great language to give to your mathematicians, data scientists and other people with rudimentary programming knowledge at best.

    As for the performance: interpreted languages are inherently slower than compiled ones. You don’t get a speed boost from first asking a separate program to translate the next line of code into a machine readable format before executing it. Just like you don’t get a speed boost from executing all your cod in a virtual machine. Looking at you, Java.
    But you don’t use python for the compute-heavy tasks. You use it for the plumbing in between and outsource the computation to a native library with python bindings, like NumPy, Pandas, PyTorch, etc. Horses for courses.

  • Chais@sh.itjust.workstoAussie Enviro@aussie.zone•What is no-till farming, and is it actually better for the environment?
    6·
    5 days ago

    Overall, it seems conventional farming methods are better for the soil than no-till practices. But that’s only if farmers plough the soil without relying on herbicides and other harmful chemicals.

    Current evidence suggests these chemicals are damaging, both for the soil and our health. So we need new ways of producing food without chemicals. “No-kill cropping” – which involves sowing seed directly into dry soils without any artificial chemicals – may be one option.

    But we urgently need more research to know if such alternative ways of farming will actually improve the health of our soils, communities and agriculture sector.