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Ask HN: Is Python dying?

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121–130 of 369 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#121
No. Python is the third most popular language on Github, for example. Ahead of either Go or Julia.

http://githut.info/

The Python 2 vs Python 3 debacle has stalled the adoption of new features into Python for quite a while now. Nevertheless, Python has a very nice design at its core. Maybe it doesn't need that many new features.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=perl Showing 1-10 of 220,528 Perl jobs And you know, Perl is dead. Basically, Python gave a choice to a lot of people to either invest time into 3.x without any important improvements or to keep using 2.7 and invest time playing with other languages. Which in turn accelerated Python's decline and raised questions about it dying, promoting the idea even more. But there is no need to…

Your snark was somewhat incoherent. Can you be more clear? guessing from the cpan in your name you're a Perl person?

It was coherent and I would not define it as snark. You don't comprehend his point yet you have the wherewithal to label it as incoherent & snarky -- that's snarky. But I digress..

Python users had a choice to stay in 2.7 land or make changes to their codebase for not much in return. Many chose to stay in 2.7 land, which you could safely say is stagnant. As a result, if you can't keep moving with Python, where will you go?

Since Python users have a choice to stick in 2.7 and get no rewards for it or jump into new languages that are evolving, they're going to jump into new languages and these same people are going to start saying things like "python is dead" because in their 2.7 eyes, it is dead.

Finally, unless I'm missing out on some serious deadpan sarcasm, he concludes "Don't worry it's not a bad thing" because look at Perl who everyone says is dead.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#123
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You will have to reach a little deeper for machine learning methods not supported by Julia. XGBoost has a Julia interface and you can google Julia SVM for myriad of alternatives. Packages like Mocha and MXNet are a few deep learning alternatives. PyCall is also an easy solution for interfacing with Python for things such as pyspark. It also has some of the most convenient to use parallel / distributed computing tools…

If Julia just want to replace Python as the glue interface, it seems to have no chance winning...What it can do, as a glue layer, that Python cannot do?

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The kids? I see young people using python more than any other language by FAR. What region are you? I've seen this through the northeast and midwest United States.

Second this. Python is just the perfect language for concept proving or prototyping.

You haven't tried Scheme.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what they're going to say already, without even asking? Yes: - It has been done before - I've been around the Python ecosystem a long time and I know a lot of its users (a random sample, if you will) - I spent several years freelancing as a Python dev which gave me the occasion to do exactly that. While that is not a representative sample on its own, my data matches up with the rest. But all things aside,…

I'm not interested in the health of the python3 ecosystem at all. My only point is, was and remains, that statistics are more complicated than simply 'those statistics do not match my personal perception of things'; justify your argument with actual data. I'd would be interested to see any alternative stats on the subject you care to link to.

In my original reply, I explained why the PyPI statistics are misleading. I then explained to you that there is no easy alternative. The Python interpreter doesn't embed Google Analytics.

What you're left with is polling, and I gave you insight (backed with my own experience which, yes, is actual data) into what you might find if you went that route. I have no actual numbers on such polling because my samples are too small to be useful. All samples are too small to be useful at this point.

The reason I brought up the health of the ecosystem is because you seem to think I'm biased, or lying, or maybe I'm just a bad person and like one version more than the other. I was just trying to remind you that it's a language version, not a presidential candidate.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#129
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...

To be fair, Python 2.x is installed everywhere and python 3.x wasn't really usable in production until 3.3. And there's barriers to migration like Twisted has.

It's been a lot of years, but people are slowly and finally starting to migrate to 3.

It could be worse. I'm still waiting for perl6 because those guys got caught up in Haskell hell.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=perl Showing 1-10 of 220,528 Perl jobs And you know, Perl is dead. Basically, Python gave a choice to a lot of people to either invest time into 3.x without any important improvements or to keep using 2.7 and invest time playing with other languages. Which in turn accelerated Python's decline and raised questions about it dying, promoting the idea even more. But there is no need to…

The exact same could be said about Perl 6 ;)

It can't be said - Perl6 is completely different language and brings a lot of desireable features on the table. The problem is that it is not so easy to port Perl5 code to Perl6 as porting Python from 2 and 3.
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