Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Incredible Growth of Python

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 224 posts

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#91

Post by tcdent »

acomjean wrote: post #88
tcdent wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely false. While PHP has gotten better recently, the language is not nearly as powerful or complete as almost all of the popular alternatives. Up until very recently, something like the Django ORM was impossible to express in PHP. Take an honest look at the available frameworks (especially in comparison to something archaic like Drupal) and you'll find there's no competition.

Python certainly has a lot more software written for it. I use it for scientific computing. For building websites, php has plenty of good options too. I do really like the Silex framework for website construction. I backend process with java or python when needed to do any substantial computations. The "standardization" on common libraries from symfony and zend, have made everything a lot better.

Referencing a micro-framework shows just how out of the loop you are. A better example of a PHP framework is Yii, but you still see tons of ambiguous arrays used because of the lack of expressiveness in the language.

Zend is not even a contender for modern web application development. And again, the gratuitous use of arrays for configuration highlight the shortcomings of PHP.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#92

Post by mark-r »

chrisseaton wrote: post #26
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…

> it's the newer ... Java Python (1991) is older than Java (1995).

But Java was an overnight success, while it took Python years to get traction. I was exposed to both around the same time, probably 1995, but I ignored Python until the second time I encountered it in 2003. It just didn't have the hype.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#93

Post by myth_drannon »

AlexMax wrote: post #51
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 sa…

ML/AI hype started in 2011-2012.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#94

Post by cutler »

Searching Indeed.co.uk by title I've noticed Django gradually gain a 10% lead over Rails in the last 12 months. Python:Ruby is currently 2.9 for London and 3.2 nationwide. I think Django's rise is due to the increased adoption of Python generally and also the meteoric rise of Node.js in the same space as Rails.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#95

Post by ohsonice »

s17n wrote: post #61

Python is pretty much becoming the de facto language of academia (outside of CS). I wonder how much this is driving overall Python usage?

Grad student at a math department here- I see python used in tons or research applications with fellow students studying math, engineering, stats, etc. But in my experience Matlab still reigns king in math academia, especially in classroom environments.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#96

Post by cutler »

antod wrote: post #59

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 see…

I don't think hype is the main factor. Ruby's decline is due to its narrow focus on web development and Rails in particular. Whilst there certainly are gems covering other areas of computing Ruby never seemed to diversify the way Python has. With Node.js eating Ruby's lunch in the web development sphere Ruby is left looking like the single-commodity Venezuelan economy. Let me add that I think Rails is a fantastic piece of software. Maybe TruffleRuby and Substrate VM will revive Ruby's fortunes. Matz's promises for Ruby 3x3 are too little too late, I fear.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#97

Post by cutler »

jzl wrote: post #39
coldtea wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Search Indeed.co.uk by job title. Python has seen a big increase in adoption here in the UK in recent years.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#98

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

oliwarner wrote: post #60
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My Python 2 code already converts cleanly to Py3 with 2to3. There will be zero effort for me to port anything when 2.7 is EOLed. I just want to be able to use the new features without dancing around the forward compatibility game.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#99

Post by jetpks »

brianwawok wrote: post #75
wlesieutre wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 edi…

Those all seem like pretty basic developer best practices to me. Of course each project needs it's own virtualenv. In fact, each project should have it's own docker image. Why install an application library to the entire system? That is not a good idea in ANY language. And of course scripts need to use the right virtualenv. Or better yet - why not put each app in it's own docker? That bundles up everything into a sin…

> Those all seem like pretty basic developer best practices to me.

Those are all bleeding edge developer best practices that didn't exist five years ago. Folks coming from matlab (an example I read above,) probably aren't in the industry and many likely don't even know docker exists OR why they would want to use it.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#100

Post by int_19h »

autokad wrote: post #85
brianwawok wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

pip (py2) on windows is an absolute disaster. pip install numpy .... if you are using windows, using python without this website is nearly impossible: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

Things are a lot better with Python 3 on Windows, and especially so with Python 3.5+.

"pip install numpy" will actually work, among other things. But even for packages that don't have binary wheels and have to compile things, it's much easier now to install a compiler toolchain (it's actually a single download!), and have your Python installation just pick it up automatically.

Post reply on HN