The Incredible Growth of Python • Hacker News Board

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#51

Post by AlexMax » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

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…

> Anecdotally it doesn't seem to me that python usage in "industry" has grown that dramatically in the last five years, but there could be other factors involved such as education. Or my biased gut instinct could be completely off.

I actually was looking at these numbers just a few days ago, trying to decide on what language to embed in something I'm working on (CPython, Duktape Javascript or Lua), and came to the same confused realization - the number of Python questions on Stack Overflow had increased significantly over the last few years, but I couldn't quite correlate why. I put in a bunch of different related tags, but none of them could account for such a large jump.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cdjan...

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#52

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

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 ?

I'm surprised by the decline of C#

The graphs are for # of views to questions on SO involving that language. What it likely means for C# (and PHP/Java, etc) is that the user-base is maturing and stabilizing, and not as many questions need to be asked (or found). For C#, it could also have something to do with the fact that the MSDN .NET docs have vastly improved over the past 3-5 years.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#53

Post by photojosh » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:08 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #25

pen2l wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm curious, what issues do you run into with python3 incompatibility? Most scientific stuff I've done works in python3. In fact, its now possible to run a tensorflow/opencv/scipy environment entirely from pip in a virtualenv, though it won't be the fastest. which is amazing . Doing that kind of thing in any other language would require docker. In general, if you're sticking to python3, the answer will always be "use…

Why won't it be the fastest? I didn't think there would be any difference between "native" in the system paths and in a virtualenv.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#54

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

nl wrote: post #50

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.

To be fair, this was also true when I was using Matlab back before switching to Python (2006ish!), except you had to dig through documentation instead of just having everything immediately available on SO. :)

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#55

Post by joshuamorton » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:19 PM UTC

photojosh wrote: post #53

joshuamorton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what issues do you run into with python3 incompatibility? Most scientific stuff I've done works in python3. In fact, its now possible to run a tensorflow/opencv/scipy environment entirely from pip in a virtualenv, though it won't be the fastest. which is amazing . Doing that kind of thing in any other language would require docker. In general, if you're sticking to python3, the answer will always be "use…

Why won't it be the fastest? I didn't think there would be any difference between "native" in the system paths and in a virtualenv.

So, for things like tensorflow, you have to build from source to enable certain optimizations. Wheel's aren't source builds essentially.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#56

Post by epalmer » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:29 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #44

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.

I abandoned Python 2 around April 2017 for greenfield.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#57

Post by jeremyjh » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:29 PM UTC

jaco8 wrote: post #10

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

It had a flash a few years ago when it changed names but overall does not seem to be going anywhere hype-wise.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#58

Post by hackbinary » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:31 PM UTC

We've standardised on Python and we're migrating all of our systems to Python / Django / Postgres from PHP / Drupal / WordPress / MySQL. We started out with one senior Dev on the Python stack, and simply found that the productivity on Python/Django just too compelling to stay on PHP. The (senior) Dev on Python had a couple of highly successful projects which resulted with him getting some junior Dev support. Then the other Devs started to notice and saw/felt that they were missing out on better and more advanced tooling. They then started to push to move their main environments to Python/Django. This has further been pushed by the business stakeholders who have seen the Python/Django projects move much faster than PHP projects.

So for us, that is now 6 Devs on Python/Django plus some consultancy support. So we've move from 2 python Devs to 6 Python devs within the last year.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#59

Post by antod » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:33 PM UTC

As someone who has been using Python since 2000 roughly, another minor factor (besides the obvious data science factors) might also be the decline in Ruby. Ruby (and Rails) growth in the 2005-2010 era, seemed to noticeably put the brakes on Python's previous growth up till that point. Back then Ruby had all the boosterism/hype and Python was the supposedly "boring/legacy" option. Even now, Python's growth doesn't seem driven by hype the same way Ruby's was. It always seemed to be a more pragmatic choice rather than a fashionable one.

Although somewhat ironically, I don't use much Python any more now that I work at a mostly Ruby/Rails company haha.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#60

Post by oliwarner » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:42 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #44

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.

Why are you deliberately making things harder for yourself? You're going to need to upgrade these projects within three years. Just seems like a wasted opportunity not to get off on a strong footing.