Alternatives to Selenium logo

Alternatives to Selenium

Protractor, Cypress, Nightwatchjs, Puppeteer, and Cucumber are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Selenium.
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What is Selenium and what are its top alternatives?

Selenium is a popular open-source automation testing tool used for web application testing. It allows users to write test scripts in various programming languages like Java, Python, and C#, and supports multiple browsers. Key features of Selenium include cross-browser testing, parallel test execution, and integration with various tools like TestNG and JUnit. However, Selenium has limitations such as the need for strong programming skills, slow execution, and lack of comprehensive reporting.

  1. Katalon Studio: Katalon Studio is an all-in-one automation testing tool that offers a comprehensive solution for web, API, mobile, and desktop testing. Key features of Katalon Studio include a built-in recorder, scriptless automation, and seamless integration with Jira and Git. Pros of Katalon Studio include easy test creation and management, while cons include limited support for mobile testing.
  2. TestComplete: TestComplete is a commercial automation tool that supports web, desktop, and mobile application testing. Key features of TestComplete include keyword-driven testing, script customization, and test data management. Pros of TestComplete include a user-friendly interface and detailed test reports, while cons include high cost for enterprise use.
  3. Cypress: Cypress is an open-source end-to-end testing tool specifically designed for modern web applications. Key features of Cypress include real-time reloads, automatic waiting, and network traffic control. Pros of Cypress include fast test execution and robust test debugging capabilities, while cons include limited browser support.
  4. Robot Framework: Robot Framework is an open-source test automation framework for acceptance testing and robotic process automation. Key features of Robot Framework include keyword-driven testing, easy-to-read syntax, and support for Selenium and Appium. Pros of Robot Framework include extensibility and flexibility, while cons include a steep learning curve for beginners.
  5. Watir: Watir is an open-source Ruby library for automating web browsers. Key features of Watir include a simple and readable syntax, multi-browser support, and integration with BDD tools. Pros of Watir include ease of use for Ruby developers, while cons include limited support for non-Ruby environments.
  6. Playwright: Playwright is an open-source automation tool from Microsoft that supports cross-browser testing for web applications. Key features of Playwright include automated waiting, device emulation, and robust API for testing. Pros of Playwright include fast test execution and reliable automation for complex scenarios, while cons include limited documentation and community support.
  7. TestProject: TestProject is a free automation testing platform that offers a codeless automation solution for web, mobile, and API testing. Key features of TestProject include built-in test recorder, test maintenance AI, and community-driven test scripts. Pros of TestProject include easy setup and collaboration with team members, while cons include limited support for non-standard technologies.
  8. UFT (Unified Functional Testing): UFT is a commercial automation tool from Micro Focus that supports web, mobile, and API testing. Key features of UFT include keyword-driven testing, object identification, and integration with ALM tools. Pros of UFT include comprehensive testing capabilities and robust support for enterprise environments, while cons include high licensing costs.
  9. Protractor: Protractor is an end-to-end testing framework for Angular and AngularJS applications. Key features of Protractor include easy setup for Angular projects, built-in test reporting, and support for Selenium WebDriver. Pros of Protractor include seamless integration with Angular applications, while cons include limited support for non-Angular applications.
  10. Appium: Appium is an open-source automation tool for mobile applications that supports native, hybrid, and mobile web apps on iOS and Android platforms. Key features of Appium include cross-platform testing, framework flexibility, and integration with popular testing frameworks. Pros of Appium include a wide range of language bindings available, while cons include complex setup and configuration for some applications.

Top Alternatives to Selenium

  • Protractor
    Protractor

    Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications. Protractor runs tests against your application running in a real browser, interacting with it as a user would. ...

  • Cypress
    Cypress

    Cypress is a front end automated testing application created for the modern web. Cypress is built on a new architecture and runs in the same run-loop as the application being tested. As a result Cypress provides better, faster, and more reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress works on any front-end framework or website. ...

  • Nightwatchjs
    Nightwatchjs

    Nightwatch.js is an easy to use Node.js based End-to-End (E2E) testing solution for browser based apps and websites. It uses the powerful Selenium WebDriver API to perform commands and assertions on DOM elements. ...

  • Puppeteer
    Puppeteer

    Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome. ...

  • Cucumber
    Cucumber

    Cucumber is a tool that supports Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) - a software development process that aims to enhance software quality and reduce maintenance costs. ...

  • PhantomJS
    PhantomJS

    PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow. ...

  • Python
    Python

    Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best. ...

  • TestCafe
    TestCafe

    It is a pure node.js end-to-end solution for testing web apps. It takes care of all the stages: starting browsers, running tests, gathering test results and generating reports. ...

Selenium alternatives & related posts

Protractor logo

Protractor

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End-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications
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PROS OF PROTRACTOR
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    Easy setup
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    Quick tests implementation
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    Flexible
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    Open source
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    Promise support
CONS OF PROTRACTOR
  • 4
    Limited

related Protractor posts

Raziel Alron
Automation Engineer at Tipalti · | 7 upvotes · 2M views

Currently, we are using Protractor in our project. Since Protractor isn't updated anymore, we are looking for a new tool. The strongest suggestions are WebdriverIO or Puppeteer. Please help me figure out what tool would make the transition fastest and easiest. Please note that Protractor uses its own locator system, and we want the switch to be as simple as possible. Thank you!

See more
Sai Chaitanya Mankala
Tech Lead at KIOT Innovations · | 6 upvotes · 863.1K views

Protractor or Cypress for ionic-angular?

We have a huge ionic-angular app with almost 100 pages and 10+ injectables. There are no tests written yet. Before we start, we need some suggestions about the framework. Would you suggest Cypress or Angular's Protractor with Jasmine / Karma for a heavy ionic app with Angular?

See more
Cypress logo

Cypress

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When testing is easy, developers build better things faster and with confidence.
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PROS OF CYPRESS
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    Open source
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    Great documentation
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    Simple usage
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    Fast
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    Cross Browser testing
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    Easy us with CI
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    Npm install cypress only
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    Good for beginner automation engineers
CONS OF CYPRESS
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    Cypress is weak at cross-browser testing
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    Switch tabs : Cypress can'nt support
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    No iFrame support
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    No page object support
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    No multiple domain support
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    No file upload support
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    No support for multiple tab control
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    No xPath support
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    No support for Safari
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    Cypress doesn't support native app
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    Re-run failed tests retries not supported yet
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    No support for multiple browser control
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    $20/user/thread for reports
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    Adobe
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    Using a non-standard automation protocol
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    Not freeware
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    No 'WD wire protocol' support

related Cypress posts

Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 28 upvotes · 3.9M views

When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.

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Robert Zuber

We are in the process of adopting Next.js as our React framework and using Storybook to help build our React components in isolation. This new part of our frontend is written in TypeScript, and we use Emotion for CSS/styling. For delivering data, we use GraphQL and Apollo. Jest, Percy, and Cypress are used for testing.

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Nightwatchjs logo

Nightwatchjs

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Automated testing and continous integration framework based on node.js and selenium webdriver
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PROS OF NIGHTWATCHJS
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    Open source
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    Testing
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    Automates browsers
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    Better cross browser (use selenium)
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    Cross-Browser Testing
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    Multiple Browser Support
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    Parallel Test Running
CONS OF NIGHTWATCHJS
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    No automatic wait
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    Less flexibility
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    Limited native mobile app support
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    Limited browser support
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    Configuration complexity

related Nightwatchjs posts

Benjamin Poon
QA Manager - Engineering at HBC Digital · | 8 upvotes · 1.9M views

For our digital QA organization to support a complex hybrid monolith/microservice architecture, our team took on the lofty goal of building out a commonized UI test automation framework. One of the primary requisites included a technical minimalist threshold such that an engineer or analyst with fundamental knowledge of JavaScript could automate their tests with greater ease. Just to list a few: - Nightwatchjs - Selenium - Cucumber - GitHub - Go.CD - Docker - ExpressJS - React - PostgreSQL

With this structure, we're able to combine the automation efforts of each team member into a centralized repository while also providing new relevant metrics to business owners.

See more
Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 7 upvotes · 606.6K views

For our internal team and collaboration panel we use Nuxt.js (with TypeScript that is transpiled into ES6), Webpack and npm. We enjoy the opinionated nature of Nuxt.js over vanilla Vue.js, as we would end up using all of the components Nuxt.js incorporates anyways and we can adhere to the conventions setup by the Nuxt.js project, which allows us to get better support in case we run into any dead ends. Webpack allows us to create reproducable builds and also debug our application with hot reloads, which greately increased the pace at which we are able to perform and test changes. We also incorporated a lot of testing (ESLint, Chai, Jasmine, Nightwatchjs) into our pipelines and can trigger those jobs through GitLab CI. All packages are fetched through npm, so that we can keep our git repositories slim and are notified of new updates aswell as reported security flaws.

See more
Puppeteer logo

Puppeteer

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Headless Chrome Node API
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PROS OF PUPPETEER
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    Very well documented
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    Scriptable web browser
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    Promise based
CONS OF PUPPETEER
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    Chrome only

related Puppeteer posts

Raziel Alron
Automation Engineer at Tipalti · | 7 upvotes · 2M views

Currently, we are using Protractor in our project. Since Protractor isn't updated anymore, we are looking for a new tool. The strongest suggestions are WebdriverIO or Puppeteer. Please help me figure out what tool would make the transition fastest and easiest. Please note that Protractor uses its own locator system, and we want the switch to be as simple as possible. Thank you!

See more
Dave Willenberg
Founding Director at Detroit Technical English · | 7 upvotes · 34K views
HTML Templates: a Pain in the Backend

We chose Pug because writing raw HTML is about as enjoyable as a fart in a spacesuit, and writing decently-rendering HTML for enterprise email clients is a soul-sucking type of black magic.

Pug takes HTML as a (...markdown) language out of the stack by using a simple, sane syntax to represent HTML in just JavaScript©. Piecing together what you need from any number of standalone - including functional - components is both delightfully easy, and easy to maintain.

All you're really writing are exportable JavaScript functions that take a single Object parameter - once that concept takes hold, you'll quickly swear off angle brackets in favor of neatly indented and extensible e-mail, invoice, and reporting templates.

There's a jstransformer filter for instant interop with just about every preprocessor ( Stylus , in our case) and file format out there. Pass that compiled HTML though Juice on Node.js and bam - rugged HTML-emails that hold up in even the wonkiest Lotus Notes clients.

That the end result is 'just HTML' is the final cherry on top. Debugging needs only DevTools, and Puppeteer 's now all you need to create fancy-pants PDFs to your heart's content.

See more
Cucumber logo

Cucumber

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Simple, human collaboration.
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PROS OF CUCUMBER
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    Simple Syntax
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    Simple usage
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    Huge community
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    Nice report
CONS OF CUCUMBER
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Cucumber posts

    Benjamin Poon
    QA Manager - Engineering at HBC Digital · | 8 upvotes · 1.9M views

    For our digital QA organization to support a complex hybrid monolith/microservice architecture, our team took on the lofty goal of building out a commonized UI test automation framework. One of the primary requisites included a technical minimalist threshold such that an engineer or analyst with fundamental knowledge of JavaScript could automate their tests with greater ease. Just to list a few: - Nightwatchjs - Selenium - Cucumber - GitHub - Go.CD - Docker - ExpressJS - React - PostgreSQL

    With this structure, we're able to combine the automation efforts of each team member into a centralized repository while also providing new relevant metrics to business owners.

    See more

    I am a QA heading to a new company where they all generally use Visual Studio Code, my experience is with IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm. The language they use is JavaScript and so I will be writing my test framework in javaScript so the devs can more easily write tests without context switching.

    My 2 questions: Does VS Code have Cucumber Plugins allowing me to write behave tests? And more importantly, does VS Code have the same refactoring tools that IntelliJ IDEA has? I love that I have easy access to a range of tools that allow me to refactor and simplify my code, making code writing really easy.

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    PhantomJS logo

    PhantomJS

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    Scriptable Headless WebKit
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    PROS OF PHANTOMJS
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      Scriptable web browser
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      Depends on QT
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      No ECMAScript 6
    CONS OF PHANTOMJS
      Be the first to leave a con

      related PhantomJS posts

      Tim Abbott

      We use CasperJS because we adopted it back in 2013 for JavaScript frontend testing. It was a really nice system back then compared to what else was out there; you had PhantomJS as a programmable browser that actually rendered CSS and everything, it was really fast (speed is a big downside of e.g. Selenium), and it was possible to make non-flaky frontend integration tests with it.

      I wouldn't recommend it today, because PhantomJS is a basically dead project, and as a result, so is CasperJS. I expect we'll migrate to something else. We haven't in large part because 95% of our new tests are written with a simple Node.js-based unit testing framework we use that run 35K lines of unit tests covering most of our JS codebase in 3.6 seconds. And for the things where we want an integration test, CasperJS does work, and I think there's a good chance that waiting another year or two will result in our being able to switch to a much better option than what we'd get if we migrated now.

      See more
      Python logo

      Python

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      A clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.
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      PROS OF PYTHON
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        Great libraries
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        Readable code
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        Beautiful code
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        Rapid development
      • 689
        Large community
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        Open source
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        Elegant
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        Great community
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        Object oriented
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        Dynamic typing
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        Great standard library
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        Very fast
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        Functional programming
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        Easy to learn
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        Scientific computing
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        Great documentation
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        Productivity
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        Easy to read
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        Matlab alternative
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        Simple is better than complex
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        It's the way I think
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        Imperative
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        Free
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        Very programmer and non-programmer friendly
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        Powerfull language
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        Machine learning support
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        Fast and simple
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        Scripting
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        Explicit is better than implicit
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        Ease of development
      • 10
        Clear and easy and powerfull
      • 9
        Unlimited power
      • 8
        It's lean and fun to code
      • 8
        Import antigravity
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        Print "life is short, use python"
      • 7
        Python has great libraries for data processing
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        Although practicality beats purity
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        Flat is better than nested
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        Great for tooling
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        Rapid Prototyping
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        Readability counts
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        High Documented language
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        I love snakes
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        Fast coding and good for competitions
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        There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious
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        Now is better than never
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        Great for analytics
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        Lists, tuples, dictionaries
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        Easy to learn and use
      • 4
        Simple and easy to learn
      • 4
        Easy to setup and run smooth
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        Web scraping
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        CG industry needs
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        Socially engaged community
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        Complex is better than complicated
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        Multiple Inheritence
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        Beautiful is better than ugly
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        Plotting
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        If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad id
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        Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules
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        Pip install everything
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        List comprehensions
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        No cruft
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        Generators
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        Import this
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        It is Very easy , simple and will you be love programmi
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        Many types of collections
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        If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a g
      • 2
        Batteries included
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        Should START with this but not STICK with This
      • 2
        Powerful language for AI
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        Can understand easily who are new to programming
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        Flexible and easy
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        Good for hacking
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        A-to-Z
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        Because of Netflix
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        Only one way to do it
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        Better outcome
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        Sexy af
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        Slow
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        Securit
      • 0
        Ni
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        Powerful
      CONS OF PYTHON
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        Still divided between python 2 and python 3
      • 28
        Performance impact
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        Poor syntax for anonymous functions
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        GIL
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        Package management is a mess
      • 14
        Too imperative-oriented
      • 12
        Hard to understand
      • 12
        Dynamic typing
      • 12
        Very slow
      • 8
        Indentations matter a lot
      • 8
        Not everything is expression
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        Incredibly slow
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        Explicit self parameter in methods
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        Requires C functions for dynamic modules
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        Poor DSL capabilities
      • 6
        No anonymous functions
      • 5
        Fake object-oriented programming
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        Threading
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        The "lisp style" whitespaces
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        Official documentation is unclear.
      • 5
        Hard to obfuscate
      • 5
        Circular import
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        Lack of Syntax Sugar leads to "the pyramid of doom"
      • 4
        The benevolent-dictator-for-life quit
      • 4
        Not suitable for autocomplete
      • 2
        Meta classes
      • 1
        Training wheels (forced indentation)

      related Python posts

      Conor Myhrvold
      Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 10M views

      How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

      Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

      Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

      https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

      (GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

      Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

      See more
      Nick Parsons
      Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream · | 35 upvotes · 3.4M views

      Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.

      We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)

      We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.

      Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.

      #FrameworksFullStack #Languages

      See more
      TestCafe logo

      TestCafe

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      A Node.js tool to automate end-to-end web testing
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      PROS OF TESTCAFE
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        Cross-browser testing
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        Open source
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        Easy setup/installation
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        Built in waits
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        UI End to End testing
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        Supports Devices without extra software/package
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        Both client and server side debug
      CONS OF TESTCAFE
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        No longer free

      related TestCafe posts

      What tools will be a good fit for the AngularJS application? I am experienced in Selenium WebDriver with Java. Any suggestion for Selenium or TestCafe?

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