Ask HN: Why Python?

In my and many other developers experience and as indicated by studies, the expected number of bugs per line of code is constant and independent of the programming language. Thus, say, 400 lines of Python will contain the same number of bugs as 400 lines of C. But 400 lines of Python contains much more functionality than 400 lines of C. This is what you have been missing.

Thanks to Numba, you can even JIT python to native machine code and gain 10 - 30x performance boost. And you can even compile the code to CUDA GPU code! Pretty cool to do that in python, rather than in a C dialect.

I got into Python from C/C++ for data plumbing in the late 2000s, before data science / ML really took off.

I think much of what appeals to me comes in three camps:

One: "Zen of Python" philosophy. The idea of both explicitness and being "exactly one way of doing things" helps with menial tasks I don't want to think too deeply about. Maybe I _shouldnt_ think too deeply about how I move some files around, parse JSON, or hit an API.

Two: Batteries included. The standard library has always been extensive and "just works" in ways other language ecosystems have long struggled to catch up to. Especially for data / file plumbing tasks. It's also not very complicated to do most simple things in without a 3rd party library.

Three: C integration. Writing native C modules seems to have been baked into the language from day one which has led IMO to much of the data science ecosystem. The ecosystem seemed to connect with the practical, old-school C programmer part of my brain, and make a lot of sense from a perspective of "get shit done" imperative programming style.

One maybe critique -

I think the nature of Python, and how people historically approached it, can lend to a kind of lazy/bad software engineering.

People historically had gotten into Python because of dumb scripts, and not because they care to think deeply about how code SHOULD be structured. Python's practicality is a bit in contrast with the culture of Ruby where aesthetics are highly prized. So a criticism of Python could be its very easy to get started with a dumb script, to solve a practical problem, that eventually becomes a critically important project. Unfortunately everyone just focusing on "getting the next thing done" means it can morph into unmaintainable spaghetti mess because its some side thing.

I don't know if that's the languages fault per-se, or just a side effect of the "lack of ceremony" needed to do work. Certainly, you can and should have high software engineering standards for your Python project. Just something I've observed perhaps as Python itself can often be a "side" thing, not the primary focus of practitioners.

You can't use Java at scale without worrying about the low level details (e.g. performance). So in a sense python is in the same club as java.

I don't understand the need for python either. I've built data processing and visualization tools in C++ and prefer to do that so I am aware of the performance implications. With python you still need to be aware of what happens under the hood, but then you also need to learn the syntax and identation, so it's like you have multiple jobs. Why not learn C or C++ and use that? There are endless libraries you can use. AFAIK anything that exists for python can be used from C or C++.

It's especially puzzling when getting to a coding interview and the person only knows python and doesn't understand why you never had the need for pandas or any other python specific libraries.

I'm wondering if python hasn't been pushed such that more coder drones can be created easily which makes it easier to hire people and pay them less.

Python was favored by universities, professors and the like a long time ago. Maybe it just had this academic feel to it.

This is even why it started to pick up in AI / ML / etc space. Some students that used it during class may also carry on with it.

It was also common for sysadmins before Go took over. A lot of the earlier tools were Python based.

Usually languages are created by people and because people like it.