Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

Perl6 was a much greater mess than Python3.

I'm more surprised that Ruby didn't do better.

Of _course_ boring is better. How could it not be? If you are trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want to be thinking about is the language itself.

The language you adopt to code up a solution should force you to think clearly, but no more than that. Executable pseudocode is as close to an ideal state as you can get for a high-level language.

Perl, meanwhile, was filled with multiple ways to do things -- famously and absurdly thought of as a virtue -- reveled in side effects, and did so much implicit work with variables and flow that perl was often unreadable by anybody else, including the you of three months from now.

"Python did everything other scripting languages did, but in a cleaner and more comprehensible way" tells you most of what you need to know about Python's victory, but the death blow was delivered by the perl community's love of complexity, which led to the disaster that was Raku.

By the turn of the century, it was clear that python 3 was a better plan for the future than perl 6.

Basically every languages mostly escapes scrutiny except from very niche corners (usually people deeply committed to other languages that aren't actually considering alternatives, but criticizing everything that isn't their preferred language for not being their preferred language) until it succeeds, because there are enough of them that basically no one cares to put the time into scrutinizing them until they achieve a critical mass.

That's not why Python succeeded against other languages.

And to be honest when you start using it, even just for simple things such as function signature, with the proper IDE it helps you catch mistakes.

It was, in my experience, before Python 3 clamped down on mixed spaces on tabs; before the `SyntaxError`s got better (for example the handling of `try` without `except`); and before VSCode got so popular (such that all the novices were using who-even-knows-what random editor and you had to figure out every time how they were actually producing the indentation, whether it does/can convert tabs to spaces).

And, oddly enough, before LLMs. Not so much because they explain anything all that well, but because lazy clueless people now get correctly indented code generated in-place rather than copying and pasting from Stack Overflow and not having any clue how to make the pasted code line up properly.

But now I far more often see people who are clueless enough that they can't distinguish the REPL from a command line ("why is `pip install ...` a syntax error?"), or are struggling with whatever is the latest attempt by the Python team to make Python easier to install and manage on Windows, or who seemingly can't wrap their head around the idea that Python has to know where on disk to look for the installed libraries (or why it won't work to just put everything in the system environment). And in terms of the language itself, probably the biggest stumbling blocks are things like command-query separation ("why can't I `foo.append(bar).append(baz)`?") and just using functions properly (which typically boils down to "why doesn't `return foo` let me refer to `foo` in the calling function?", but generally stated completely differently).