Earlier quoted context omitted.
... python 3 is a really a fairly small effort to learn when you know python 2. You'll learn most of what you need to know in a few days, tops. This comment feels extremely disingenuous
You don't invest time to learn it, you invest time by writing or converting code.
Ask HN: Is Python dying?
241–250 of 369 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#242Python is the least-worst general purpose imperative not-performance-critical OO scripting language. It has lots of problems (weird scoping, community issues, roundabout docs, `''.join()`, crippled lambda, no variable declarations, some lousy naming, module distribution issues, yet more ways to do string formatting, whitespace-sensitive syntax instead of curlies+semis), but the alternatives have worse problems, so Python is at the top of the heap for its type of language.
I think Python could easily be replaced --- for greenfield projects --- by something better, but there's nothing better right now, and more and more people will keep using Python for that very reason.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#243Earlier 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 wasn't incoherent to me - he used Perl to argue that just because a language has a high number of open jobs on simply hired doesn't mean that the language is not dead.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#244Earlier 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…
... python 3 is a really a fairly small effort to learn when you know python 2. You'll learn most of what you need to know in a few days, tops. This comment feels extremely disingenuous
I used to write a lot of python, and the hard part is that as you write code you're pulling in more and more external libraries, and sooner or later one of them will be incompatible with python 3. Then if you want to continue using python 3 in your own code, you need to spend the effort to port that library to python 3.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say Python is dominant in startups across the board. Though it is strong in data-heavy environments (with all it's issues nonetheless). I've been a Pythonista for over a decade, and the API scene isn't quite as utopian as you describe. Date/time handling in particular is a really poorly handled area, but there's quite a few out there. That said, in general I agree the 'batteries included' approach is good,…
I think there's more of an interest in scalability and compile-time checking among startups nowadays, hence the shift from dynamic languages to lightly static languages like Go or all of the type-checking and Haskell-derived JS variants out there. This means Python and Ruby aren't as much of a first choice as they used to be, even if they're arguably a lot faster for getting MVPs out.
> I think there's more of an interest in scalability and compile-time checking among startups nowadays
Which is precisely why all of my new code targets Python 3 and I use PEP 484, and before that I always had type information in my docstrings. There's some places where duck-typing makes sense, but a lot of times I'm really just doing things like I would in a statically typed language so I just type the crap out of everything and run MyPy against it.
Unfortunately the runtime itself doesn't benefit at all from the type information, but I know I any of my .Net-centric colleagues can easily inherit any of the Python code I've written and be able to read it without much headache - without having to intuit what magic goes on behind the scenes, especially with things like the Pyramid request/context objects.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clojure and Scala have gotten close as well. I've seen Scala in use at scale at both universities and corporations. Clojure is being used in production by at least a few well known companies, too. Both have the primary benefit of being backed by the JVM.
Scala seems to have some momentum. I've wondered if the companies that have adopted it are using it like jvm haskell or a just a better java?
This is just one [massive] project, but HMRC are rebuilding in Scala atm, & from talking to the developers working on the project, bit of both: selling it as a better Java with all the associated interop with existing stuff, but individual devs attracted by the functional side. The Guardian seemed to have similar reasoning.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you get downvoted for that it's because Python 3 is objectively better than 2 in every way other than the points I listed above... Seriously. List one feature Python 2 has that Python 3 doesn't?
Massive compatibility with the biggest installed Python codebases? People already know it? The most used?
All points I listed above.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#248Yes, 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…
> displacing PHP (which obviously no one ever uses 21% of the Internet uses Wordpress, which is built with PHP.
Yes, that was a bit of snark, sorry. Was hoping that would emphasize how huge of news it is that Python moved past PHP even on such an arbitrary language benchmark.
Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#249Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. http://elixir-lang.org/
And really enjoyable... That's what really counts right?