The Incredible Growth of Python • Hacker News Board

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#41

Post by oxplot » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 9:30 PM UTC

Does the usage of a site like SO (where you ask for help) necessarily correlate with growth of a language? Or more specifically, does the difference between views of two different languages on SO correlate with real world difference of growth between those two languages?

As a personal example, I've searched for answers related to golang far less than I have for python because I tend to find my answers by simply reading golang docs but in case of python, docs do not help me as much so I turn to google and consequently to SO.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#42

Post by goodoldboys » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

As someone who works with Python every day, this isn't surprising. I forget where I heard/read it, but someone made the claim that Python is the "second best language for everything" (paraphrasing) and I couldn't agree more. Need to create a web app that interfaces with a data pipeline? Python/Django/Flask is perfect. There are countless other examples too.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#43

Post by jaco8 » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #11

jaco8 wrote: post #10

Yes , but the young contenders already exist. If Nim gets more traction , over time it may replace Python.

Don't hold your breath. Nim doesn't have the kind of ecosystem, and hasn't shown signs of having one.

Do not worry ,still breathing here , when I started Fortran,RPGII and Cobol was the thing and Python did not exist. Now Python is becoming the old elephant and new languages like Nim will evolve and they will grow an ecosystem over time.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#44

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

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.

Jan 1 2018 is the day I abandon Python 2 for all greenfield projects.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#45

Post by jzl » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

doozy wrote: post #16

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…

Fellow 20+ years Python user here. Python adoption outside first world countries have always lagged considerably behind. A common pattern among technologies. I suspect a lot of that growth is the rest of the world catching up.

To the article's credit it actually differentiates between first world ("high income") countries and the rest of the world. The growth has been even more in high income countries so that explanation doesn't work for the data in the article.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#46

Post by torbjorn » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC

python has a cool name. as time goes on new kids learn to program. kids choose the programming language with the cool name.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#47

Post by cs702 » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC

This is probably related to explosion of interest in AI and deep learning (DL), because Python has become THE standard language for AI/DL research.

Most AI frameworks support Python out of the box, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, Theano, and CAFFE/CAFFE2, which together currently have the most developer mindshare. Every single TensorFlow, Pytorch, Theano, and CAFFE/CAFFE2 tutorial or example is written in Python.

With very few exceptions (e.g., the occasional Lua code coming out of Yann Le Cun's group at FB), new AI papers come with code written in Python.

If you want to see Python's utter dominance in this field, just search for "deep learning" or "neural net" on github.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#48

Post by doozy » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 9:58 PM UTC

jzl wrote: post #45

doozy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow 20+ years Python user here. Python adoption outside first world countries have always lagged considerably behind. A common pattern among technologies. I suspect a lot of that growth is the rest of the world catching up.

To the article's credit it actually differentiates between first world ("high income") countries and the rest of the world. The growth has been even more in high income countries so that explanation doesn't work for the data in the article.

Yes, I'm aware of that. I wasn't talking specifically about the data in the article but about Python's growth in general. I don't believe the popularity of a tag in a forum is a reliable indicator of the growth of a language, it may simply be this forum becoming more popular among Python users.

Python's rising popularity among the scientific computing community is simply not enough to support the idea of a dramatic increase in Python adoption. As a long-time user of the language I share your appreciation Python usage in the industry has not dramatically increased in the past few years.

On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence suggesting Python is becoming increasingly popular outside high income countries.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#49

Post by ATsch » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:00 PM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #40

brianwawok wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can do this, but it's not as easy. The pipfile project is an effort to improve this.

The current standard way to do this is with a virtualenv and a requirements.txt file in which you specify the version of your dependencies, which you can then install with pip install -r requirements.txt.

Format is "packagename==0.1.0" (>=, To get something similar (but inferior) to lockfiles you can use "pip freeze > filename"

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#50

Post by nl » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:02 PM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #47

This is probably related to explosion of interest in AI and deep learning (DL), because Python has become THE standard language for AI/DL research. Most AI frameworks support Python out of the box, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, Theano, and CAFFE/CAFFE2, which together currently have the most developer mindshare. Every single TensorFlow, Pytorch, Theano, and CAFFE/CAFFE2 tutorial or example is written in Python. With…

This is true. Even the Le Cunn group has switched to PyTorch I think.

It's also because no one can work out how to use matplotlib properly, so you need to look at about 1000 StackOverflow questions per line of code.