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The Incredible Growth of Python

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Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#31

Post by highd »

pen2l wrote: post #9
andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Python 2 advocates were quite firm in telling us that Python 3 and its incompatibility with Python 2 had killed Python and people would abandon Python altogether in droves for other languages. This post is suggesting the opposite, that Python is more healthy than ever and growing incredibly fast.

Three of us (including me), in an academic lab, are making the jump from matlab to python. We use py3 (of Anaconda, on Windows10). We like it, but we are constantly screaming and bitching about the complications of 2 3 ("Ahhh X and Y module only works on py2!", "Ahhh device developer only provides example code for Labview and Matlab!", "Ahhh python isn't even supported for this device/application!"). Package manageme…

I highly recommend switching to the conda distributions and package ecosystem. A lot of those issues have gotten a lot better for me since I did that.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#33

Post by jzl »

kronos29296 wrote: post #7
jzl wrote: post #3

TL;DR: Slightly interesting but narrowly focused article with clickbait-ish headline. It charts the growth of Stack Overflow python question views in the last five years. While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. And no hypothesis is given for the growth in question views, although they tease a future post about that. It would have been far mor…

I think even though Python in the industry like in web isn't growing as much as say Node, in other places like Data Science and Intro to programming in Unis and Schools Python is growing very fast. The article is not narrow minded but has a narrow focus and only analyses concrete data from a single source. It may be globally accurate but indicates a rising trend in people being interested in python. While Python usag…

I just edited my comment to say narrowly focused rather than narrow-minded. That is definitely what I meant to convey but chose the wrong words, thanks for pointing it out.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#34

Post by shepardrtc »

pen2l wrote: post #9
andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Python 2 advocates were quite firm in telling us that Python 3 and its incompatibility with Python 2 had killed Python and people would abandon Python altogether in droves for other languages. This post is suggesting the opposite, that Python is more healthy than ever and growing incredibly fast.

Three of us (including me), in an academic lab, are making the jump from matlab to python. We use py3 (of Anaconda, on Windows10). We like it, but we are constantly screaming and bitching about the complications of 2 3 ("Ahhh X and Y module only works on py2!", "Ahhh device developer only provides example code for Labview and Matlab!", "Ahhh python isn't even supported for this device/application!"). Package manageme…

If you're using Windows, then WinPython (http://winpython.sourceforge.net/) is an absolute necessity. I have two separate installations, one for 2.x and one for 3.x, and I have zero issues. Works amazingly well and comes with just about everything you need already installed and working. Can't say enough good things about it.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#35

Post by StavrosK »

mylh wrote: post #30

I'm a web developer and I love python because it provides me with the fastest and shortest way from an idea to its implementation. In most cases prototype works forever in production. Rich standard library and clear version support lifecycle are also very important. I developed with many other languages including java, с++ and Haskell and python is my choice among all.

I agree (Django is life), but I find myself wanting the new optional typing and type checker to mature so I can add them to my set of linters. I'm tired of 1) not knowing whether I made a mistake and passed something of the wrong type and 2) not being able to see at a glance what types each function is supposed to accept and return.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#36

Post by StavrosK »

andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Python 2 advocates were quite firm in telling us that Python 3 and its incompatibility with Python 2 had killed Python and people would abandon Python altogether in droves for other languages. This post is suggesting the opposite, that Python is more healthy than ever and growing incredibly fast.

I really don't know where this is coming from. The only people I hear talking about a 2v3 divide are my Javascript developer friends, who are saying that as outside observers.

As a Python dev, I (and all the other Python devs I know) were just waiting for (and helping) libraries to start working with 3 before we can switch over. These days, all my new projects are in 3, 2 is pretty much for legacy code only.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#37

Post by wlesieutre »

brianwawok wrote: post #27
heydonovan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Package management was so frustrating coming from Ruby to Python. There are so many programs, and version conflicts that I run into all the time. With gems and bundler, it was rare if things didn't work.

Really? Pip should be pretty straight forward. Maybe you use different libraries than I do.

But be sure to use Pip into this year's flavor of virtual environments rather than globally, since you might have multiple projects that need different versions of the same package. And be sure to run the right version, I've seen situations where a computer had python 2 and 3 installed, somehow python3 became the default when running "python" but if you ran "pip" you'd get dumped into the old version.

And if your editor has a "Run script" function, it also needs to deal with "Activate the correct environment" for whichever flavor of virtual environment you've used.

Any what beginner would be confused by tutorials using all sorts of different setups (virtualenv, venv, pyenv, pipenv, virtualenvwrapper, pyenv-virtualenvwrapper)? Most of them, I think.

"venv" is the newest one - shipped in the python3 package except when it's not (Ubuntu, maybe others) and doesn't make copies of the python binaries for each environment. That always seemed wasteful to me, but I suppose it was the easy way around path problems with the ecosystem not having a solution built in.

I love python when I'm only using the standard libraries, but if I have dependencies it's messier to set up than I want it to be.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#38

Post by [deleted] »

agumonkey wrote: post #8

I'm surprised by the decline of C#. I thought it was better off than java these days. Also PHP is gliding down. They improved the language a lot, but I can't say I will miss the PHP world much. About python, isn't it related to numpy mostly ?

[deleted]

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#39

Post by jzl »

coldtea wrote: post #13
jzl wrote: post #3

TL;DR: Slightly interesting but narrowly focused article with clickbait-ish headline. It charts the growth of Stack Overflow python question views in the last five years. While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. And no hypothesis is given for the growth in question views, although they tease a future post about that. It would have been far mor…

> While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. You believe that Python would ever generate more questions over time on SO without getting more users/usage? I guess the mysterious dumbing down of a stable user base is an alternative explanation.

Did you actually read the article? Of course generating more questions is likely indicative of more usage. But the graph shows it from being in last place (of the listed languages) in 2012 with ~4% of the question views to being first place right now over all other languages with ~10% of question views. Python has grown a lot over the past 5 and especially 10 years in wide usage but I've seen no other evidence that the chart in the article should be believed to have a direct correlation with usage. There are many possible explanations of a more indirect correlation that could be skewing the numbers in unexpected ways but none are discussed in the article.

I'm the biggest python fan you'll meet (ok I'm sure that's not strictly true) but I followed the headline hoping to see more concrete data to support the claim of "Incredible Growth" and came away disappointed.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#40

Post by ufmace »

brianwawok wrote: post #27
heydonovan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Package management was so frustrating coming from Ruby to Python. There are so many programs, and version conflicts that I run into all the time. With gems and bundler, it was rare if things didn't work.

Really? Pip should be pretty straight forward. Maybe you use different libraries than I do.

I do mostly Ruby professionally and dabble in Python, and I agree with heydonovan. Pip works fine for installing things, but near as I can tell, Python has no equivalent of bundler - a tool to install specific versions of a bunch of libraries, generate a lockfile ensuring that your production server and all of the devs are all running it with the same version of everything, and letting you have as many versions of a gem installed as you want, and still running a project with specific versions other than the latest.
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