Is it happening because of Python getting more popular or getting more complicated to use?
More popular, especially for homework assignments (i.e. among people who don't know how to search and don't understand Python well enough to read the docs).
Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
11–20 of 166 posts
Re: Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
#12It just means that almost all trivial questions about JS have been asked and answered, now it's Python's time. --- Also I bet that if each language's words were compared to the overall vocabulary for SO, or at least to the cumulative one for these languages, the differences would stand out more. And of course, the usefulness of a word cloud visualization is highly dubious to me.
No if you see the questions, they are the same over and over, for js or python. Simple things you can google, answered a 100 times.
Re: Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
#13Seems like the most difficult programming is no longer cache invalidation and naming things. Its now about strings, and to duplicate arrays ... The stats are skewed because hordes of beginners. Mainly driven by what schools teaches and what languages has the most hype. That said Python is huge . Damn you significant white space.
I often say that Python is the best at nothing, but pretty good at most things. And hence it became huge by the sheer appeal of being versatile. Life is short and most people needing to program are not programmers. Also many programmers didn't start as such, and were simply looking for an easy way to solve a task.
Good C bindings and a willingness to accept that it wasn't ever going to be good at doing low level fast code are an underrated facet of how python grew so popular.
Golang, by contrast, is really quite schizophrenic sometimes about whether it wants to be a high or low level language.
Re: Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
#14Is it happening because of Python getting more popular or getting more complicated to use?
Coming from Perl, Python library documentation makes me want to tear my eyes out. No I don’t want a cutesy fucking module homepage, I want reference documentation with some examples. Authoring PyDoc was the worst experience too. No I don’t want to install and configure a static site generator in order to have rich text documentation.
It's strange to see this is your experience, because I had the exact opposite: Python documentations are usually very comprehensive, nicely formatted. Important projects have very good documentations and setting up a new documentation is very easy with Sphinx. Maybe you should try it again, it might have changed a lot since you looked it.
Re: Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
#15Is it happening because of Python getting more popular or getting more complicated to use?
Probably both. Python ecosystem is expanding super fast. Look what is happening in data-science. Newborn Python libraries getting outdated too soon just like in JS ecosystem.
Expanding? Hope they expand & knock down most of the garbage documentation I've seen in python. I don't need any more library ref static sites like they do with java but with a python feel to them. Give me a functional example of how to use your code, not that you have lots of special methods that do things. Show me how those things are done.
Re: Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
#16Is it happening because of Python getting more popular or getting more complicated to use?
I'd say the former: Python is becoming more and more common as an introductory language, and is used as "glue" in many fields that people try to get into (AI, "data science", ...). There's also been a few areas where complexity has been added (asyncio in my mind being the main new source of confusion), but I don't think those are common enough to have a huge impact.
Re: Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
#17Seems like the most difficult programming is no longer cache invalidation and naming things. Its now about strings, and to duplicate arrays ... The stats are skewed because hordes of beginners. Mainly driven by what schools teaches and what languages has the most hype. That said Python is huge . Damn you significant white space.
I often say that Python is the best at nothing, but pretty good at most things. And hence it became huge by the sheer appeal of being versatile. Life is short and most people needing to program are not programmers. Also many programmers didn't start as such, and were simply looking for an easy way to solve a task.
There is a bit more insight to be found by reversing that - Python is simpler than other programming languages and achieves that by sacrificing a little power.
Compare it to C, which it has displaced as an introductory language. Python and C are superficially interchangeable to a beginner, but to learn C you have to invest time into pointers and memory management. Python sacrifices the efficiency of direct memory management to avoid the complication of pointers. Arguably, this is a significant benefit because it also cuts down on ways to introduce bugs.
Compare it to a Lisp - Python has a pretty inferior set of basic capabilities (can't even use a dict as a dict key, drives me mad), but that just means there is only one easy way to do things that everyone uses. Less room to think up clever ways of doing things, less complexity reading other's code.
Being the 'best' language for a task has a huge cost - incidental complexity created by including specialist constructs. Python's success suggests maybe programmers prefer this complexity to be encapsulated in a library rather than the language core.
Re: Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
#18Seems like the most difficult programming is no longer cache invalidation and naming things. Its now about strings, and to duplicate arrays ... The stats are skewed because hordes of beginners. Mainly driven by what schools teaches and what languages has the most hype. That said Python is huge . Damn you significant white space.
Definitely a lot of beginners, many learning it in school, and many learning programming not as their main thing, but as a tool to use in whatever field they are in. More like MATLAB than Java or C#.
But I believe that a fair bit of them will continue to use Python in the future (and get over the beginner problems), as they get jobs, startup ideas, side-projects. Curious to see what effect that has over time.
Re: Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coming from Perl, Python library documentation makes me want to tear my eyes out. No I don’t want a cutesy fucking module homepage, I want reference documentation with some examples. Authoring PyDoc was the worst experience too. No I don’t want to install and configure a static site generator in order to have rich text documentation.
It's strange to see this is your experience, because I had the exact opposite: Python documentations are usually very comprehensive, nicely formatted. Important projects have very good documentations and setting up a new documentation is very easy with Sphinx. Maybe you should try it again, it might have changed a lot since you looked it.
I looked at it last a month ago. It was terrible.
> setting up a new documentation is very easy with Sphinx
As per my original comment, the idea that documentation should require some kind of external markdown static site generator is bizarro land.
Re: Python overtakes JavaScript as most questioned language on StackOverflow
#20I think a big part of it is how much canonical documentation and resources has improved in JavaScript vs. how much people are struggling with it in Python (as someone who does more Python than JS but does both).
Python libraries tend to have less documentation and their documentation tends to be less live whereas JavaScript has been more stable lately (something I didn't think I'd ever write).
Funnily enough the last time I really struggled with a JavaScript library's docs it was Tensorflow.js (a Python port).
Also, I'd love to see a comparison that checks "all" JavaScripts (+TypeScript).