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Ask HN: Is Python dying?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#51

Post by [deleted] »

Gratsby wrote: post #39
normac wrote: post #12

Python 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…

At my work we recently needed to hire a developer. We gave them all a very basic problem to solve and told them "use any language, use any libraries". The idea was to get a feel for their coding style - do they comment their code, is their logic something the rest of the team could follow, will they address unmentioned issues, will they press for clearer requirements, etc. A few notable solutions: 1) The C guy. Damn…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#52

Post by [deleted] »

Gratsby wrote: post #39
normac wrote: post #12

Python 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…

At my work we recently needed to hire a developer. We gave them all a very basic problem to solve and told them "use any language, use any libraries". The idea was to get a feel for their coding style - do they comment their code, is their logic something the rest of the team could follow, will they address unmentioned issues, will they press for clearer requirements, etc. A few notable solutions: 1) The C guy. Damn…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#53

Post by zokier »

mjevans wrote: post #18
droithomme wrote: post #11

No. Python is extremely useful and will remain so. However Python has fundamental design problems regarding unicode handling and 2/3 discrepancies that make it challenging to work with in a number of contexts.

I agree completely. Python could fix a LOT of that by using the (completely seriously named) https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ WTF-8 (Wobbly Transformation Format − 8-bit) encoding for it's native Unicode (like) strings. Additionally Python should then allow the (explicit) casting of WTF8 datatype to bytes and from bytes to WTF8 datatype (edit: note, I mean invalid data would be read, stored within a WTF8 datatype…

You mean something like PEP-0383? https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0383/

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#54

Post by normac »

Gratsby wrote: post #39
normac wrote: post #12

Python 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…

At my work we recently needed to hire a developer. We gave them all a very basic problem to solve and told them "use any language, use any libraries". The idea was to get a feel for their coding style - do they comment their code, is their logic something the rest of the team could follow, will they address unmentioned issues, will they press for clearer requirements, etc. A few notable solutions: 1) The C guy. Damn…

One of my favorite pieces of code I've written is a 150 line Python script I made to solve a really ugly text processing problem. I have tried to use it as a code sample when talking to potential employers, but it backfires because it makes the original problem look so simple that they wonder why I bothered to send it.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#55

Post by Jach »

bobby_9x wrote: post #2

Go doesn't have anywhere near the amount of libraries or support that we see with Python. Python isn't being assaulted on any front. We have always had multiple programming languages and some are better than others. My issue is that we seem to have these fad languages, like Ruby-on-rails. I still remember when it was rammed down our throats on HN around ~2008 and you were instantly down voted if you wanted to objecti…

I'd say PHP is still cool, there's nothing quite like it. (For good reason, according to snooty devs, who are the ones that don't think it's cool or ever was cool...) I'm probably closer to a snooty dev myself now too with my favorite languages to sip on being Clojure/Lisp/Python2.7/Nim, but man PHP was the most awesome thing when I was 15-16 and learning web programming. I still find aspects of it cool when I do web stuff in other languages (though a lot of that is probably from the CGI model), and there's no way it can maintain its 80% market share if no one (even out of ignorance) thinks it's cool.

When people ask if Python is dying on the web... seems kind of irrelevant, it never had much market share there anyway. Python's strength is in its breadth, with a few deep anchors here and there. I agree it's not going anywhere.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#56

Post by gedrap »

This is an interesting example of what might happen if you think that the things which are the most frequently mentioned on HN are the ones which are the most commonly used in production/industry :)

It's a bit dangerous bias/distortion, you can easily trick yourself into thinking that everyone is running everything with docker, soon everyone will be spinning up clusters with tensor flow to compute on their petabytes of data :) (nothing personal, OP, just something I've noticed lately).

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#57

Post by chm »

Not in my sphere of activity. I have a friend who recently started his PhD... and is moving all of his development from C/C++/Fortran to Python. Numerical code even - he just doesn't want to bother.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#58

Post by viraptor »

jsmeaton wrote: post #45
21 wrote: post #19

Interesting 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 e…

Also it's important to remember that system-wide packages get installed once, while pypi stuff will get redownloaded a lot. It means that for example users of recent arch, ubuntu and other distros which install python3 by default are more likely to have some of the dependencies already there, while anyone installing just python2 base package will download deps from pypi.

Also pip itself got upgraded to use caching by default not that long ago. All distributions defaulting to python2 will still have old pip which redownloads your packages on every installation (`tox -r` for example). More recent distros will give you tox which caches the downloads locally (which lowers the numbers).

Pypi also doesn't count private repos. If openstack started testing commits using pypi repository and turned off caching, I'm guessing it would add at least 10% to python 3.4.

TL;DR: pypi stats are interesting, but don't rely on them to give you precise answer.

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