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The Incredible Growth of Python

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Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#141

Post by nstart »

Predicting it now. A large part of the "why" is going to be because of the jump in data science. Python is an incredibly kind language to new comers in the sense that it allows you to just get started. A lot of people are making bigger jumps into data science (purely anecdotal) in the sense that they are programming more around it. Scraping data, cleaning data, etc is also really easy with Python.

Devops stuff is also a great one to pair with Python.

Reason I'm predicting this: I've kept an eye on Python+Flask /Django jobs for over a year now, and while I see "Python" show up more frequently now, "Flask" and "Django" are still about as frequent as they were in the past.

Looking forward to the "why" post. Glad that they mentioned that they'll be publishing that soon.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#142

Post by goatlover »

Twirrim wrote: post #123
mark-r wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Java was by no means an overnight success. It was way too slow for several years until they really started to do anything more than run the bytecode in the JVM.

It was an overnight success in the hype department.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#143

Post by goatlover »

blub wrote: post #118
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.

Those people were advocating for stability, not necessarily for P2. The 2->3 was a pretty big screw up, and it definitely had an impact on the language and ecosystem. Python seems to have overcome that (keyword: seems), thanks to a strong offering in data science, but 2->3 is still a headache. I never really used Python for application development, but rather for utility/scripts and I am still on 2, because I don't n…

I doubt Python is losing people to Golang in scientific computing.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#144

Post by vanderZwan »

nstart wrote: post #141

Predicting it now. A large part of the "why" is going to be because of the jump in data science. Python is an incredibly kind language to new comers in the sense that it allows you to just get started. A lot of people are making bigger jumps into data science (purely anecdotal) in the sense that they are programming more around it. Scraping data, cleaning data, etc is also really easy with Python. Devops stuff is als…

I work at Karolinska as the sole developer on a data browsing platform, inside a neurobiology research group. The entire department is either using or learning Python. Of course, the work environment itself is a severe form of selection bias, but there definitely has been an uptake in Python among scientists.

(Which leaves me kinda sad, because I like Julia more - I'm sure it will keep growing though)

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#145

Post by goatlover »

cutler wrote: post #96
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 pie…

I really hate that Ruby became synonymous with Rails. It's such a nice language on it's own.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#146

Post by goatlover »

falmak wrote: post #131
pen2l wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In their holidays, people make websites ("The next facebook!"), at term-time they make sodoku solving applications in Java for programming class.

Is "the next Facebook" really what today's students dream of building? It just seems a bit... dull. When I was a student we all wanted to create "the next ".

The next VR Snapchat?

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#147

Post by nstart »

vanderZwan wrote: post #144
nstart wrote: post #141

Predicting it now. A large part of the "why" is going to be because of the jump in data science. Python is an incredibly kind language to new comers in the sense that it allows you to just get started. A lot of people are making bigger jumps into data science (purely anecdotal) in the sense that they are programming more around it. Scraping data, cleaning data, etc is also really easy with Python. Devops stuff is als…

I work at Karolinska as the sole developer on a data browsing platform, inside a neurobiology research group. The entire department is either using or learning Python. Of course, the work environment itself is a severe form of selection bias, but there definitely has been an uptake in Python among scientists. (Which leaves me kinda sad, because I like Julia more - I'm sure it will keep growing though)

Julia is definitely a step up in data science programming. It's purpose built for data science. I guess that's also the reason why Python has grown more than Julia. The likelihood of someone having worked with Python in an unrelated field means that when starting out in another field, if the Python option exists, they are probably going to take it.

Apart from that, if one is just getting started out in data science and has never really handled a programming language before, Julia is very nice really. And their documentation is pretty damn awesome. And once you get past the performance recommendations I think it gets pretty fast (?). I'm out of my depth beyond a certain point since I've only ever experimented with it.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#148

Post by thanksgiving »

yladiz wrote: post #130
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 think you're right, the biggest pain for a general developer for Python is determining which package manager to use. I'm thankfully insulated from it a bit due to using Docker for a lot of my development, but I hate the fact that Pip won't install to your home/project directory unless you coax it to (and sometimes still won't even if you give it all the proper environment variables), and I think virtual environment…

I like python3 -m venv myfolder; source myfolder/bin/activate;

It is the easiest way to use python3 because even fedora (one of the more bleeding edge) likely won't finish migrating 2 to 3 in current year.

Why do you not like venv? What could be done better?

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#150

Post by goatlover »

int_19h wrote: post #101
jaco8 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's undeniable that some new languages will supplant the current bunch (except possibly for C; this thing might well be unkillable by this point). But I don't see any particular reason why it would be Nim.

C might be killable if the hardware significantly changes at some point, leading to systems languages better suited to handling that hardware.
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