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Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#161
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that several professors have learned that I'm useful for resolving packaging related problems and they contact me for help with them. They expect that if they had a job in industry then there would be somebody who they would file a ticket with and then that person would help sort out the tangle. Also, in a previous job, I was responding to tickets of that kind (e.g. "why does installing this version of foo pre…

That makes some sense, except you're mostly describing a division of labor where the people relying on you to fix their environments probably could do it themselves if you weren't around. I think we agree these are not typical end users. > Others provide support in other ways. The guy racking and stacking GPUs at a data center somewhere is doing so, at least partially, in support of some specialist wielding python to…

My point is that they are typical. I think there are legions of them. Whole classrooms at a time, whole departments at a time, people whose job is to write python according to whatever procedures came down from on high.

We don't notice them because they're not participating in conversations about which programming language might be suitable. Instead they're having conversations about whether Python is necessary or whether they can get away with a spreadsheet.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#162
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whitespace thing is actually one of python's major flaws. That feature attaches syntactic meaning to non-printing characters. From a human standpoint, there're many examples of silence having some kind of meaning. From an engineering standpoint, that entire methodology is insane. Communication needs to be positive and deliberate. Remember that Apple SSL bug "goto fail"? That was a whitespace bug, because even if…

>Communication needs to be positive and deliberate. I don't know what you mean by this. >The whitespace thing is actually one of python's major flaws. That feature attaches syntactic meaning to non-printing characters. From a human standpoint, there're many examples of silence having some kind of meaning. From an engineering standpoint, that entire methodology is insane. It's not non-printed characters, it's alignmen…

> Here, I would argue that we can effectively prove that hanging indentation is vastly more parallel to natural language than braces.

I see where you're coming from. However, I would counter that in the use cases you've shown, as well as all of the use cases I've seen in the real world, there are important differences between them and Python.

1. Hanging indentation is most often used in things that are small in scope, where you can easily see both the start and the end of the list. Python blocks can grow without bound.

2. Hanging indentation in real life doesn't require perfect alignment. Python does.

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