No we use python a lot, we are a python shop
Ask HN: Is Python dying?
41–50 of 369 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#42I heard an anecdote from a colleague who was surveying undergraduate CS courses. The prof was explaining what the course was going to be about and said that the students could choose any language they wanted to complete the work something like C or Java or anything didn't have libraries for everything. A student wanted to know if this meant they couldn't use python. Prof said, ya, you probably shouldn't use python for this, too tempting to cheat. Grumbling, so prof asks, how many people actually know C, Java, or something like that? ~50% hands. How many only know Python? ~40% hands. These were CS majors, in an upper level CS course.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#43That may be a view through the distorted HN lenses. Spend some time on Lambda the Ultimate and you'll think imperative programming is dying. Go is new and has lots of issues. It's annoying on many fronts and badly needs improvements in packaging area. It's good for some things and worse for others. JS is for frontend, because it's the only supported language. (although there are python-to-js compilers available if yo…
We use python it is our primary language
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#44There are lots of tools and even lots of toolboxes.
What do you like to do? What can you find work for?
If you know other languages, you can shift easily. It's not like you have to invest years into a new language if you're already proficient with others. You're not going to forget if/else logic, what functions do, or object oriented basics. Most languages just have their own syntactic sugar on all of that.
Learn Python.
Learn Node.
Learn Julia.
Be flexible.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#45Interesting stats regarding version 2/3 usage from a moderator of /r/python today: Here's the breakdown by which Pythons were used to download from PyPI in the last two weeks: 2.7 85.90% 2.6 6.66% 3.4 4.64% 3.5 2.09% 3.3 0.56% 3.2 0.12% (Two weeks was ~133 million downloads) https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/45sm94/what_are_the...
Be aware that PyPI isn't a great way to get accurate statistics. One of the reasons is when tox tests via a matrix, Python 2.7 is usually the first python listed, and if it fails then Python > 3 will not be tested. Also, it'll reuse libraries from the pip download cache.
I don't doubt that python 2.7 accounts for the majority of the downloads, but I sincerely doubt 2.7 usage is at ~85%.
2.6 usage is probably almost exclusively RHEL/CentOS 5/6 system pythons and not representative of actual projects.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#46Python occupies a niche that isn't going away any time soon: making it easy and natural to write readable, straightforward, more-or-less imperative, slightly boring code of the type you learned in CS 101. This is still a very practical way to solve many problems and I'd wager for most programmers it's still the easiest way to do things. Maybe it will always be. It's hard to imagine there'll be a generation of program…
Why can't Julia fill that role?
Try to do machine learning in Julia; it is difficult. If I want to say fit a gradient boosted tree or SVM its not support in Julia, whilst appears in Python/R libraries. Also, with Spark being more and more popular in the data science landscape, the lack of Julia bindings is also a no for the data scientists I work with (Spark has Python/R bindings).
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#47The moment a language is born is the moment it starts dying. No language lasts forever.
My opinion: Python will outlive the three languages you list. But it's dying outside data science, and maybe even there. Optional typing can't compete with modern type inference, and there is too much dynamism in the existing Python ecosystem (even though it's so rarely used - there's not a monkeypatch culture like in Ruby - it's used often enough that you can't just remove it). But not today, probably not in five years either. In fact with the community finally having rallied around 3.x this is probably the best moment in years to leap into Python.
But yeah, all languages are dying, some faster than others. You have to make your own judgements, and learn general skills so that you're not bound to one particular language (unless you're very confident in that one language).
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#48In case of Go, it is a dead baby, the language and the tooling suffer from dogmatism and inflexibility. Python is stable and good now, it does not need to change that much. Thus, those who mix up version numbers with stock prices and become happy when they increase switch away and complain. Ignore them.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#49I like Python, but it's gone downhill. Python was doing just fine until Python's little tin god came up with Python 3 and tried to drive a stake through the heart of Python 2. That backfired, badly; six years on, Python 2 still has far more production use than Python 3. (No, it's not about Unicode. Python 2.6 and later do Unicode just fine. I've written sizeable all-Unicode systems in Python 2.6. It's just that in 3.…
Shame you started with "Python's little tin god" as it meant I took everything else you said less seriously.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#50Let's look at Julia for example. Its currently gaining steam in numerics, machine learning other technical computing areas...I hypothesize this is compound growth. For general computing, what would happen when it gains static compilation and can be distributed easily on Linux/Windows, Mobile and then web (with Emscripten/web assembly). Then its as expressive if not more than python, easy to read/write and faster (unl…
It's really easy to get a huge growth rate if you start from a very small number.