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The Incredible Growth of Python

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Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#211

Post by real-hacker »

goodoldboys wrote: post #42

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.

Why second best? I think it is the best for almost everything. One reason is that its grammar is so intuitive, that you only need to think about the problem to solve. With other languages, you always need to look out for grammar issues.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#212

Post by Walkman »

pbreit wrote: post #127
goodoldboys wrote: post #42

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.

I agree that Python works well for just about everything but wish there was a framework between Django & Flask.

Pyramid is exactly that.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#213

Post by yladiz »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #206
yladiz wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

pip install --user pkgname Does that not work for you?

The user flag doesn't always work correctly, but my main annoyance is that I shouldn't have to supply a flag to do this. It should be default.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#214

Post by coldtea »

dom96 wrote: post #171
coldtea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm curious what the ecosystem for Python looked like in ~1999. Did it show signs of having the ecosystem it has now in those years? I'm certain that almost everyone dismissed it due to its syntax (there are still people out there that dismiss it because of that).

I actually used Python commercially in 1999.

The "killer app" then was an app server + document store called Zope.

Things were smaller than today, but Python was already gaining popularity for scripting. Circa 2001 or so it also had good Gtk and Qt bindings -- there were even some KDE-inspired satellite commercial companies catering to Python/QT.

The discussions in Python land then were about the mythical Python 3000 -- the next, re-imagined version of Python that would fix issues, etc. That was eventually Python 3.

Perl was still king for scripting/admin stuff but losing momentum, and Ruby was mentioned as a nice alternative to Python, but with much smaller use at the time (and even today I think).

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#215

Post by collinmanderson »

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 think Tenserflow is an especially big driver. It's basically making Python the machine learning language of choice.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#216

Post by uvtc »

nstart wrote: post #209
uvtc wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking forward to the "why" post. Glad that they mentioned that they'll be publishing that soon. I think the "why" is because, for many users: * they want a small and easy, dynamically-typed, garbage-collected language with few surprises (see `import this`). Perl misses out here. * they want something built with C so there's easy access to native libraries. Languages on general-purpose VMs miss out here. * I don't…

Thats a pretty awesome list!. I'd love for these to be the reasons but somehow I doubt any of us are that thorough. The only reason I used python is that it was the first result that showed up in a Google search "write program to scrape web page" (ah beautiful soup. How I love thee!) The only reason I used flask was Udacitys course taught their web app course with it. I'll admit it, I've never actually analysed the b…

> I'd love for these to be the reasons but somehow I doubt any of us are that thorough.

Hm. I think there's a difference between reasons for trying out a language for some random task versus staying with it. I've bounced around between lots of different languages, and I suppose the list I presented above are why lots of people stay with Python.

I think you're judgement of "mmm does it feel productive" roughly corresponds somewhat with the above list. Though I accidentally left off "good-enough docs", which I think is a given.

> I couldn't really understand Apache in 30 minutes so I used nginx instead.

Yeah. Though I think it has a lot to do with how good the docs are. Definitely, if a project can't tell me what it is, why I'd want to use it, and an overview of how it fits in, I'm very hesitant to pursue it further.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#217

Post by uvtc »

tim333 wrote: post #205
uvtc wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking forward to the "why" post. Glad that they mentioned that they'll be publishing that soon. I think the "why" is because, for many users: * they want a small and easy, dynamically-typed, garbage-collected language with few surprises (see `import this`). Perl misses out here. * they want something built with C so there's easy access to native libraries. Languages on general-purpose VMs miss out here. * I don't…

A lot of people like the Python syntax. It has to be about the most readable of all computer languages.

> A lot of people like the Python syntax.

Of course.

> It has to be about the most readable of all computer languages.

Quite readable, sure. Though my point is that curlies and semicolons are more familiar to many (and easier to edit/navigate in my editor, for that matter), and probably would be preferred. My comment was about why I think many (not all by any stretch, of course) choose a language like Python.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#218

Post by abledon »

pbreit wrote: post #127
goodoldboys wrote: post #42

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.

I agree that Python works well for just about everything but wish there was a framework between Django & Flask.

Use Django and strip out the middleware and admin/authentication addons.

see https://github.com/lightweightdjango

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#219

Post by mixmastamyk »

yladiz wrote: post #213
mixmastamyk wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pip install --user pkgname Does that not work for you?

The user flag doesn't always work correctly, but my main annoyance is that I shouldn't have to supply a flag to do this. It should be default.

I agree, and they are working towards it. In the meantime, there are shell aliases. That's how I ask rm to confirm deletion as well.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#220

Post by pbreit »

abledon wrote: post #218
pbreit wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Python works well for just about everything but wish there was a framework between Django & Flask.

Use Django and strip out the middleware and admin/authentication addons. see https://github.com/lightweightdjango

auth is a must-have (i've never written an app that did not need basic auth) and admin is a very, very nice to have. It still feels "thick" to me in other areas.
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