Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 162 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#81

Post by BeetleB »

fud101 wrote: post #69
dpark wrote: post #30

> If you survey the language landscape now, a language can be much better than Python but never get the chance Python did just because it happened to look a bit better than Perl. Which is absurd to me. You’re struggling to understand Python’s success because in your head the primary reason Python succeeded was because it happened to be prettier than Perl, and you can’t wrap your head around why that’s enough. But it’…

My gut feeling is that it succeeded due to escaping scrutiny. I had heard enough critiques of the language from CL folks but the rest of the world was just happy to get a nicer Perl that could be used to glue together C code into useful apps and scripts.

> My gut feeling is that it succeeded due to escaping scrutiny.

You keep saying it, but from 2000-2010, what scrutiny did it escape, exactly?

Are you saying when universities dropped Java/C++ for the introductory course and replaced it with Python, they simply threw dice to pick the language?

Are you saying all the Perl programmers who kept saying "Python will never have the power of CPAN" didn't exist?

Are you saying Eric Raymond never wrote an essay on the virtues of Python?

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#83

Post by dpark »

BeetleB wrote: post #80
fud101 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl had charm, it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it. It still remains a beautiful language that I regret not learning due to having a superior taste. Python had none of it. I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort. The only argument you can make is boring is better imho.

> it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked. Lisp/Scheme are also beautiful to those who 'get' it. > I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort. Plenty of people have already told you. 95% of pro…

> Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked.

It’s really not the crux of the issue though. “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not. This is certainly not the only reason that Python became so successful.

Tangentially, in my experience Perl was great for one liners and small glue projects. I never saw significant, valuable works of code built in Perl even when I worked at a company (Yahoo) that widely used Perl. I am convinced that much of Perl’s beauty is in its cleverness and’s not in its utility for large projects.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#84

Post by BeetleB »

dpark wrote: post #83
BeetleB wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked. Lisp/Scheme are also beautiful to those who 'get' it. > I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort. Plenty of people have already told you. 95% of pro…

> Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked. It’s really not the crux of the issue though. “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not. This is certainly not the only reason that Python became so successful. Tangentially, in my experience Perl…

> “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not.

Dial the clock back to 2002, and this statement is not true. Perl became popular not because of its beauty, but because of it being extremely effective glue. It was a language to get stuff done while writing little code.

The only mainstream alternative was Python.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#85

Post by LexiMax »

spenrose wrote: post #63

1. Python was designed by testing syntax with novice users to see what they could adopt easily.[1] > 90% of current Python users weren’t born when it was created. They all had to learn, and Python is the easiest language to learn because Guido and his teammates, unlike $LANGUAGE_DESIGN_GOD, approach the problem as experimental scientists rather than auteurs. 2. Python is conceptually compact, dominated by hash tables…

I feel like if #1 was done today, there is no way on god's green earth that whitespace would be used for code blocks.

It is far and away the most common footgun novices run into when I'm answering questions about why their code doesn't work.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#86

Post by spenrose »

spenrose wrote: post #79
spenrose wrote: post #63

1. Python was designed by testing syntax with novice users to see what they could adopt easily.[1] > 90% of current Python users weren’t born when it was created. They all had to learn, and Python is the easiest language to learn because Guido and his teammates, unlike $LANGUAGE_DESIGN_GOD, approach the problem as experimental scientists rather than auteurs. 2. Python is conceptually compact, dominated by hash tables…

I forgot two, er, three: 9. Python got lucky that its inevitable screwups (Python3) didn’t quite kill it. 10. Swift and Kotlin both define programming as serving the compiler (specifically LLVM) rather than serving the coder’s problem . (I haven’t discussed Rust so far since it isn’t attempting to compete with 98% of Python use cases, but if you squint you can see it as going one step further than Swift and Kotlin an…

I can't stop thinking about this. WRT Perl specifically, it’s fascinating how the two competitors adopted Unix shell patterns. Python is handicapped to this day by not automagically snarfing up environment variables, etc. But Perl leaned hard into TECO-style gibberish and the meta-syntax that is regular expressions, confronting beginners with arbitrary complexity. It feels like Wall embraced the system administrator side of coding — the side that has an enormous capacity for tracking corner cases and managing impedance mismatches. Wall was trained, perhaps not coincidentally, as a linguist, a field where continent facts really matter. Guido, on the other hand, was an accomplished mathematician. (This is the Dwarf / Elf distinction from Cryptonomicon.)

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#87

Post by Mawr »

It was designed by a person with good taste, not by a committee. That's about it, there's nothing inexplicable or accidental about a well designed language rising to the top.

The excessive mentions of Perl are weird — it, along with PHP are prime examples of awful taste. Those are the languages that only gained any traction because they happened to be available at the time, not because they were any good.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#88

Post by dpark »

BeetleB wrote: post #84
dpark wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked. It’s really not the crux of the issue though. “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not. This is certainly not the only reason that Python became so successful. Tangentially, in my experience Perl…

> “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not. Dial the clock back to 2002, and this statement is not true. Perl became popular not because of its beauty, but because of it being extremely effective glue. It was a language to get stuff done while writing little code. The only mainstream alternative was Python.

I see. There are two separate but related questions.

1. Why did Python replace Perl?

2. Why did Python become so extremely popular?

The answer to the first is because it’s better than Perl for so many engineers in so many cases. The answer to the second is much broader.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

#90

Post by Mawr »

fud101 wrote: post #76
theamk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense.. Python _was_ heavily scrutinized when it was introduced - the whole "Perl vs Python" comparison was pretty popular for a while, with either of those being declared winner, depending on the author. If there is really a killer argument for Perl over Python that was overlooked in all those years, why don't you say that argument, or even better, write a blog post explaining why Perl is better than P…

Perl had charm, it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it. It still remains a beautiful language that I regret not learning due to having a superior taste. Python had none of it. I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort. The only argument you can make is boring is better imho.

No.

Readability, explicitness, one way to do things are examples of great design taste. Perl was the opposite of all that.

Post reply on HN