Over the last year (for the first time) Python surpassed PHP in popularity and seems to be gaining on C#.
Python has never been more alive, IMO.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
Ask HN: Is Python dying?
221–230 of 369 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely dominant in finance? Do you have a source for that claim?
Actually that's probably not accurate now that I think about it. Python is mostly used by quants and people figuring out what trades to make, as well as for some of the internal business tools. Whereas the people building the actual exchanges are probably using Java or C++.
"Finance" is such a broad term with respect to IT - you'll find anything if you look hard enough. The following is based on my experience only - I'm sure there will be lots on here with different experiences:
* I've seen more C++/Java/C# than anything else, with a large legacy base of COBOL/RPG (yes, GMI, we're looking at you...).
* Industrial-grade quant libs (for risk, P&L, models that need regulatory approval) tend to be in C++, with the infrastructure to run them increasingly in Java.
* Lots of VBA on the desktop. Every department runs on Excel...
* Python is making inroads (see Quartz at BofA, Athena at JPM), but I suspect that it's still vastly outnumbered (by whatever measure) by C++/Java.
Some firms (and departments in bigger shops) embrace new technology agressively - at my firm I know of large Scala projects, python, big data (mainly Mongo/Hadoop), R and some Haskell.
That said, on my first job in the UK for a large insurance firm, we employed a team that wrote custom CICS machine code for Z-series mainframes. Beat that with yer fancy functional languages...
So no, I wouldn't say that python is dominant.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#223Despite some rifts in the community around 2 vs 3 versions, Python is still widely used, no worries. My take is Python 3 has done more damage to community than we accept to recognise. Python 3 has taken a strong academic approach to make the language better while being valid made it feels like a regression compared to Python 2. The 'print "abc"' not working anymore without brackets is a good example of it.
Agreed. If anything, Python 3 is dying - Python 2 is going strong.
If the above is true, the Python language has outlasted the Python developers - like C.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#224Yes, Python is dying, that's why it just moved up in the Tiobe rankings to #5, displacing PHP (which obviously no one ever uses): http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... It's dominance of science is why Python has 25% science talks this year at PyCon, and why we see articles like: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3012442/application-develop... But yes, if you didn't know any languages, then of…
I don't see a need for the snark. I don't see this as a troll question at all. Python is obviously thriving for scientific programming but it's not hard to tell that the question being asked is about whether Python is losing popularity as a general purpose web programming language.
If someone wanted to get into building web apps would Python be a good choice?
The answer is likely to be colored by your experience. I'd say yes, it is losing ground to other languages in the context of programming for the web. The people who use it know why they're using it. Othetwise you don't see many coding boot camps teaching Python. It's all about Ruby and Node.
But is Python dying? Not by a long shot. It's just getting less attention right now because of some of the other new toys that are making a lot of noise right now.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#225That 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…
Next year has always been the year that functional programming will take over the world. It's been like that since I started programming in the early 90s. While functional concepts have leaked into imperative languages, Haskell is the only pure functional language that so far has come close to breaking out although Lisp has also gotten close a few times. (see also next year will be the year of Linux on Desktop)
Elixir is promising.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#226Yes, Python is dying, that's why it just moved up in the Tiobe rankings to #5, displacing PHP (which obviously no one ever uses): http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... It's dominance of science is why Python has 25% science talks this year at PyCon, and why we see articles like: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3012442/application-develop... But yes, if you didn't know any languages, then of…
I don't see a need for the snark. I don't see this as a troll question at all. Python is obviously thriving for scientific programming but it's not hard to tell that the question being asked is about whether Python is losing popularity as a general purpose web programming language. If someone wanted to get into building web apps would Python be a good choice? The answer is likely to be colored by your experience. I'd…
Amongst what bubble of people you're entangled with?
I consider this a troll question because frequently I see HN questions like this completely disconnected from programming communities at large (which do not participate in HN), extrapolated to the wider web of all programmers. By this factor alone I'd expect Java to be completely obsolete by now.... but obviously no one is oblivious enough to reality to suggest that.
As for that question, if you want to build webapps right now, then yes, Python, as well as Ruby, and PHP, would be absolutely fantastic choices. The library ecosystems for all three of these are incredibly rich, mature, and well supported. Choose the language of these 3 that appeals to you the most, you will not be disappointed. I'm not going to tell you which one to choose, I think you'll be happy with whichever of these 3 languages appeals to you the most.
If you don't mind filling in the occasional gap, and like the bleeding edge of newness, try Rust, or Go. I've done both, they're fun languages with interesting paradigms (built-in lightweight threads vs. memory-safety at all costs FIGHT!).
Getting less attention? According to what? Did you see the the link about dominating science? Attention according to what group of people?
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
A slightly leaner object model with a fast runtime would make it perfect.
Anything that breaks code AGAIN will kill the language for sure.
Not sure why you're getting downvotes. The 2 vs 3 has already split part of Python's userbase.
Another change that broke significant amounts of code would just make things even worse.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#228Reading HN, you'd think Java was dying (dead?) too. But it's not. It's an established language with a lot of very senior people still using it. It has it's issues for sure, but it also has a ton of libraries and support. Python I'd say is in a similar boat. Strong and established with tons of libraries, not popular amongst the kids. Edit: Apparently my use of "kids" as a sarcastic way of referring to those who won't…
I don't know. Even though there were and still are problems with Python, especially on the basis of this 2/3 thing, I wouldn't say it feels dead. Well, I mean, of course I do understand that enormous amount of people still use Java, but me personally, since I quit my job as a Java programmer it honestly feels like it doesn't exist. Except for Android it's like there's no real need to use it for anything. Unlike Python, which is pretty much go-to for any scripting and usual CLI tools, go-to for heavily domain-specific stuff, prototyping for any sciency stuff, almost go-to for statistics and ML, still among 3 first choices for web backends. Still new interesting libraries appear which you might want to use. Well, it surely feels like it's still around and relevant when starting something new. Java seems to still be heavily in use because of existing infrastructure (all banks that use Java, that is), not because it has something (maybe even some domain-specific library) which is appealing all by itself.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#229For the frontend, and asynchronous server backend (Node), JS won hands round. I don't see Python getting there.
More systems and backend use Python (including at Google) than Go.
An insignificant amount of people use (or will use in the next 5 years) Julia for data science. Python (and R, Matlab) rule there almost completely.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#230I 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.
I'm worried about a repeat of the Pascal debacle. Pascal was a good language, invented by Niklaus Wirth. It had some flaws, which were fixable. But Wirth was insistent on not doing anything which would invalidate his elegant, but limited, recursive-descent compiler. He didn't like separate compilation of modules, for example; everything was supposed to be in one big file. He had this thing about conformant-array parameters, where arrays were passed with size info. Strings were limited to 255 characters. The I/O operations all aborted on error. Integers and subranges were designed on the assumption that integers were very big. (The original implementation was for the CDC 6600, with 60-bit integers.) He pushed his version into being an ISO standard.[1]
ISO Standard Pascal is useful mostly as a teaching language. You can't do much real work in it. So Pascal fragmented, badly. There were lots of incompatible variations. In time, Pascal was abandoned.
Sometimes the original language guru has to be pushed aside before they run the language into the ground.