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Ask HN: Is Python dying?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#331

Post by fizixer »

viraptor wrote: post #5

That 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…

Not to mention, the question sounds like this:

Is smartphone dying? You can use digital camera for photos, mp3 player for music, scientific calculator for math. Looks like a smartphone is being assaulted from all fronts.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#332

Post by vram22 »

btreecat wrote: post #323
2bitencryption wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is that one day some alternative Python interpreter (Stackless, or GIL-less, or which compiles ahead of time to machine code, or something like that) will go from being merely an interesting concept to a dominant runtime. Python is such an excellent language, and it only has a small handful of elements holding it back from being even better. I feel like eventually something has to give, and either there…

I completely agree. Fixing the run time would be a large effort to addressing one of the big complaints. However I want to see packaging addressed as well, if not first. Unfortunately packaging has gotten so wonky, it is easier for me to shove my small projects into huge docker containers and liberate my sysadmins from maintaining virtual environments on servers. Servers that need to be rebuilt with more modern versi…

Interesting. What's the size / overhead of a Docker container? Not familiar with it, though know what it is, and that it is smaller than a complete VM.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#333

Post by vram22 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #142
2bitencryption wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is that one day some alternative Python interpreter (Stackless, or GIL-less, or which compiles ahead of time to machine code, or something like that) will go from being merely an interesting concept to a dominant runtime. Python is such an excellent language, and it only has a small handful of elements holding it back from being even better. I feel like eventually something has to give, and either there…

It's unlikely unless someone with deep pockets steps up, such as a corporate benefactor. But it will continue to improve as it does every other year.

Yes, one reason for the success of Java was the huge amount of investment Sun put into it - in both marketing and tech improvements. I read that they spent millions on that. And it did result in benefits. Across the span of some years, anecdotally, the performance of Java apps improved a hell of a lot - I remember noticing it, say maybe from 1.2 to 1.6 or so. E.g. some servlet + JSP based app running a lot faster at the end of that period than at the beginning.

A pity that they did not seem to handle the business side of things well, and went down and were bought. (I'm sure there were external factors too, don't mean to say it was partly or wholly their fault. Just don't know.) Don't know much details on exactly why that happened, though I did read about it now and then, and follow Jonathan Schwartz's (last CEO of Sun) blog for a while.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#335

Post by eru »

dagw wrote: post #292
stray wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old style classes. No way to subclass built-in types. No metaclasses.

Sure, but non of those things made it a bad language, or where really unreasonable things to have left out.

For me it's lack of lexical scoping.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#336

Post by tumdum_ »

thkim wrote: post #62

Unless there is another language that beats Python in terms of simplicity of toolchain, deployment and syntax, Python is not going to die. Very few people care about the performance of a language (this is same as asking whether Intel i5 or i7 is a better choice when most of what you'll be using is Microsoft Word or PowerPoint), and Python provides reasonable and handy solution to that problem as well (pypy). Bottom l…

> Unless there is another language that beats Python in terms of simplicity of toolchain, deployment and syntax

Actually those 3 things are much simpler in Go.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#337

Post by reddit_clone »

Chris2048 wrote: post #289
2bitencryption wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is that one day some alternative Python interpreter (Stackless, or GIL-less, or which compiles ahead of time to machine code, or something like that) will go from being merely an interesting concept to a dominant runtime. Python is such an excellent language, and it only has a small handful of elements holding it back from being even better. I feel like eventually something has to give, and either there…

Would it be possible to port it to the erlang-vm?

Not a good fit. Too imperative/oo to fit into Erlang's functional world.

A subset may be.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#338

Post by vram22 »

pmarreck wrote: post #257
2bitencryption wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is that one day some alternative Python interpreter (Stackless, or GIL-less, or which compiles ahead of time to machine code, or something like that) will go from being merely an interesting concept to a dominant runtime. Python is such an excellent language, and it only has a small handful of elements holding it back from being even better. I feel like eventually something has to give, and either there…

Object-oriented languages are Dead Men Walking due to the problem of global mutable state management in any medium- to large-sized codebase, coupled with dependency/inheritance hell, leading to complexity hell, leading to geometric progression of tech debt. Compounding this is the lack of good unit test suites across the board, meaning that even if you write absolutely perfectly tested and maintainable Python (or Rub…

Interesting that FP started from as long back as the time of John Backus (of Backus-Naur fame):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus

Not taking any sides in this beef, though, just an interested bystander.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#339

Post by actsasbuffoon »

vram22 wrote: post #332
btreecat wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Fixing the run time would be a large effort to addressing one of the big complaints. However I want to see packaging addressed as well, if not first. Unfortunately packaging has gotten so wonky, it is easier for me to shove my small projects into huge docker containers and liberate my sysadmins from maintaining virtual environments on servers. Servers that need to be rebuilt with more modern versi…

Interesting. What's the size / overhead of a Docker container? Not familiar with it, though know what it is, and that it is smaller than a complete VM.

It depends on the Linux distribution you use. Using Alpine Linux as a base can keep the overhead as low as a few megabytes.

Re: Ask HN: Is Python dying?

#340

Post by imron »

sangnoir wrote: post #277
x0x0 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's true. My objection to 3 was it did nothing for me. All I got out of it was work dumped in my lap just so my code would continue running. Giving us a GIL-less pypy with jvm-scale performance would be worth a lot of hassle.

> My objection to 3 was it did nothing for me...Giving us a GIL-less pypy with jvm-scale performance would be worth a lot of hassle. worth a lot of hassle to you . I imagine there are people who wouldn't find it worth the hassle. e.g. people who use python as a glue language where it's not close to being near the performance bottleneck - breaking the language to make it 'faster' would do nothing for them.

And you'd now have a 3-way split of resources (both learning materials and developers) between 2, 3 and (an imaginary) 4.
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