I was browsing the jobs secion on SO, and came across a position looking for a 'Python Software Engineer.' WHAAAAA? PYTHON IS A FUCKING SCRIPTING LANGUAGE! SINCE WHEN IS IT SUITABLE FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING?

Yay, another semantic war in 3... 2... Have yourselves a popcorn 🍿

@HCC5GDKc7 you mean hot corn?

You make me wanna establish a company and hire Brainfuck software engineers.

Not sure if trolling, but...

I looked up definitions of "software engineering" and it does not say directly or indirectly that interpreted programming languages are not suitable. Any (or most) programming language can be used for scripting.

@arraysstartat1 also terms like "scripting", "interpreted", "compiled" aren't really fixed for a language. It depends on a context

Why isn't py suitable for engineering?

Python can be compiled to machine code.

Python just comes across as one of those languages you would use for rapid prototyping before writing the final product in a more suitable language with better static type safety and other gizmos to ensure more errors are caught before actually running the code. However, I freely admit that Python may have evolved without me noticing…

*A PHP dev walks into the room*

Well I'm out of here.

*exists stage left*

@SomeNone Python has type hints, which can be checked by editors and linters. Typical interfaces (custom ABCs, Mappings, Iterables) are supported - see the "typing" library for more details.
The type hints can not be enforced at runtime.
There is a compatible (but imho ugly) syntax for Python 2, too.

@SomeNone Your rant reads as if you're not supposed to engineer software using a scripting language.

@HCC5GDKc7 exactly. By this guys logic C# isn't suitable for "engineering" because it has a REPL and can be scripted through it, or pass scripts into it. But it also is suitable because it's compilable. So...

@SomeNone "may have evolved"

Dropbox and Instagram would probably agree with you there.

@sbiewald Python 2 will be dead in 2020 anyway

@pk76 Moreover, the vast majority of web applications couldn't possibly have been engineered, by OP's logic. It's ridiculous.

@kescherRant Yes and no. RHEL 8 and Debian 10 will keep Python 2 alive for a few years, unfortunately.

Sounds like that company might have dodged a bullet then

import popcorn

popcorn.make().heat()

JavaScript anyone?

@magicMirror
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'function' object has no attribute 'make'
Oh, so that's a constructor, apparently. Too bad you didn't know that before runtime.

@Lor-inc And even if it wasn't, popcorn.make would probably take an argument of type corn, which you wouldn't know how to implement without looking at the code, so you'd create a class instance anyway. Just like in a strictly typed language. Because no matter what we do we still have interfaces, we just aren't defining them explicitly, making everyone's job much harder.

@Lor-inc this is python my friend. where everything is an 'import' away....

@kescherRant For April 2020 the release of Python 2.7.18 is scheduled, but the support end is the 1st January.
2.7.18 will be the real last official release.