Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language • Hacker News Board

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#111

Post by cashewchoo » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

iainctduncan wrote: post #104

I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my new opinion, they a…

This is my experience as well. Incidentally "this is a problem of people, not language" is one of my pet peeve statements (not that I'm mad at you, of course!) specifically because I've had it used against me enough to defend choosing, imo, bad tools. Everyone thinks they have developers that are good enough that they don't need the bumpers up when they bowl. But honestly, it's just almost never true (and if it is, it won't be for long as your company grows).

One company I worked at had "we hire the best!" as its slogan, and they used it to justify so much bad practice. No code reviews (we just don't hire people who write bad code), no unit testing (same reason), python used for huge sprawling 10+ year old codebases that's on its third or fourth generation of maintainers, and no documentation anywhere. Everything is a spelunking expedition, and there's no type safety or anything to help you figure it out. There are more than a few thousand-plus line functions that make PyCharm chug every time your touch a character.

On the flip side, the Java and C++ codebases were similarly abused (no tests, no docs, four generations of maintainers/oral tradition, no code reviews ever) but are at least two orders of magnitude easier to traverse because the type system keeps everyone honest across decades in a way that dynamic languages just do not.

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#112

Post by chpmrc » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

iainctduncan wrote: post #104

I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my new opinion, they a…

This is true for any language, strongly typed or otherwise, with or without memory management. The evidence gathered in the last decades is pretty clear: there is little to no advantage using a strongly typed language over something like Python or Ruby (on mobile so can't look up references but there's really plenty). And that's just looking at bug density, without even considering how quickly you can build something (often thanks to the great ecosystem of packages) or how easier it is to hire decent Python/Ruby/JS devs over, say, C++, Java or Rust.

That said: I wish you the best of luck!

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#113

Post by sumtechguy » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

iainctduncan wrote: post #104

I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my new opinion, they a…

I have done big and small python/C/C++ projects. For python small projects it is pretty sweet. You type some commands and you are up and running. With c/c++ it seems there is always this 'big' first time step for setup. Yet long term that seems to flip around like you have seen. Where that first time setup works pretty good for a long time. Whereas in python the org of the program becomes this dead weight you are kind of fighting. It is not awful but just kind of there. Now that is just my exp I am sure others had the opposite. But it is nice to see someone else out there thinking like I do about this. python for nice small contained things. other languages for longer term bigger projects. But it is same problem most of the time you have in many orgs. The prototype becomes the production thing :(

People always ask me 'how do I become a programmer' the first thing I always tell them is 'you need to learn python it is fairly easy to pick up and learn' I aim them at the python org website and their excellent tutorials. Funny enough it weeds out the people who do not really want to be a programmer but thought it sounded cool, as they have to stop and learn something.

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#114

Post by munawwar » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

iainctduncan wrote: post #104

I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my new opinion, they a…

IMO I doubt switching language would help. It's the same for any language. You can learn to code easy, but learning to write good code/architecture + working together in a large team is really hard.. takes lots of experience and time till the team can come together.

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#115

Post by flavor8 » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

chpmrc wrote: post #112

iainctduncan wrote: post #104

I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my new opinion, they a…

This is true for any language, strongly typed or otherwise, with or without memory management. The evidence gathered in the last decades is pretty clear: there is little to no advantage using a strongly typed language over something like Python or Ruby (on mobile so can't look up references but there's really plenty). And that's just looking at bug density, without even considering how quickly you can build something…

> The evidence gathered in the last decades

Source?

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#116

Post by mumblemumble » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #88

mumblemumble wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm finding that JVM is really starting to look threadbare as a web development language. I haven't tried Spring Boot, so I can't speak to that, but gather that a lot of people like it. Otherwise, though, it's kind of a mess of too @#$% many options and no clear winner aside from the legacy stuff that nobody actually enjoys working with on the flagship language, an alternative language that was initially promising fo…

Everyone has different ideas about what matters; I care about continuity and stability. I cannot do a monthly dance of 'library blah is no longer maintained, please try library vlah which, by the way, is completely incompatible API wise!'. I need stuff that runs fine in a decade and where the maintainers respect backwards compatibility. I have not been let down by the past decades of JVM (and PHP but I never used man…

I think we may be speaking to the same goals. My worry about the JVM is that, culturally speaking, the community has been losing interest in the old stable stuff (Which I get, it all looks like 20 years ago.), and so the Java ecosystem seems to be eagerly headed in a more "move fast and break things" direction.

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#117

Post by iainctduncan » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC

cashewchoo wrote: post #111

iainctduncan wrote: post #104

I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my new opinion, they a…

This is my experience as well. Incidentally "this is a problem of people, not language" is one of my pet peeve statements (not that I'm mad at you, of course!) specifically because I've had it used against me enough to defend choosing, imo, bad tools. Everyone thinks they have developers that are good enough that they don't need the bumpers up when they bowl. But honestly, it's just almost never true (and if it is, i…

I actually do due diligence on tech firms now for a job, and you're 100% right that the tradeoffs change dramatically when the company grows. Which doesn't mean that using the best thing possible for your expert coders at the beginning is wrong. At the beginning, you need every advantage you can get, and if you have expert programmers, give them the sharpest knife you can find! But yeah, once your company is hiring hundreds, or even dozens of devs, and is being sold every handful of years from one investment fund to another, the same set of tradeoffs no longer necessarily apply and .NET and the JVM look pretty good.

I'm writing some Java at the moment for an Android app, and it's just killing me after doing Scheme and Python, but I have to admit, if that start-up had used Java or C#, they might have been better off in the long run.

Hiring really good, disciplined people is super, super hard. My current thought is that if you don't have a super-star CTO who can attract and keep real A+ coders, don't use advanced languages. And if you do have that CTO, do it, but make sure you are architecting to make the rewrite in C# or whatever doable when you sell your company. If I were starting my own business now, I'd use Clojure or Scala or F#, and design things so that in 5 years new owners had a decent path to switch to C# or Java wherever they want.

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#118

Post by rq1 » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

iainctduncan wrote: post #104

I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my new opinion, they a…

> (ever seen "import gc" in a Python program? yes, that means what you think it means..)

I'm using it sometimes, what's the issue?

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#119

Post by iainctduncan » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

chpmrc wrote: post #112

iainctduncan wrote: post #104

I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my new opinion, they a…

This is true for any language, strongly typed or otherwise, with or without memory management. The evidence gathered in the last decades is pretty clear: there is little to no advantage using a strongly typed language over something like Python or Ruby (on mobile so can't look up references but there's really plenty). And that's just looking at bug density, without even considering how quickly you can build something…

The smoking gun wasn't really the types to be honest. It was the way you can monkey patch and have massive daisy chains of effects from a simple import statement. Import in Python can pretty much be made to do anything you want...

Re: Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

#120

Post by iainctduncan » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

sumtechguy wrote: post #113

iainctduncan wrote: post #104

I was a total raving Python evangelist for the first 12 years of my coding career, and then got a job as the CTO for a Python based startup that had been running absent a technical leader for 5 years, with relatively junior coders making all the decisions. I still love Python, but I now have a completely different attitude to hyper-dynamic languages (like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, etc). In my new opinion, they a…

I have done big and small python/C/C++ projects. For python small projects it is pretty sweet. You type some commands and you are up and running. With c/c++ it seems there is always this 'big' first time step for setup. Yet long term that seems to flip around like you have seen. Where that first time setup works pretty good for a long time. Whereas in python the org of the program becomes this dead weight you are kin…

Yeah, I hear you. Nowadays I do Scheme embedded in C/C++. The stuff I used to love Python for is now done in Scheme, and the outer containers are in C++. It's actually a really nice way to write code, for me at least. Forces a clean architecture on you, and you know you can always move anything out into C++ if you need either a library or lower-level access. I use S7, but you could use Guile, Gambit, Chicken similarly.