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

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

#121

Post by iainctduncan »

munawwar wrote: post #114
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.

You are not wrong. Any startup people reading this... your CTO is the second most important person at the company, maybe even the most important. They need to be awesome. You can't skip this.

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

#122

Post by vmchale »

iainctduncan wrote: post #96

I was a Python dev for 14 years or so (now doing mostly personal projects in C/C++, Scheme, Clojure), and 10 years ago met my partner who is a biologist. I think one thing programmers underestimate is how many scientists and academics are using Python. It's not just ML, it's pretty much every kind of scientist and tons of non-science academics too. The fact that it's a great "casual" or part-time language is huge for…

> I think one thing programmers underestimate is how many scientists and academics are using Python. It's not just ML, it's pretty much every kind of scientist and tons of non-science academics too. The fact that it's a great "casual" or part-time language is huge for these people. They aren't full time (or even self-identifying) programmers, but their programs are non-trivial. The readability, portability, tooling, and massive package ecosystem is huge for them.

I've found the reliability and tooling really unsatisfactory, at least compared to Haskell.

The libraries are there, though, and familiarity is in the departments (psychology (maybe more R?), physics, &c.)

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

#123

Post by neverartful »

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've often found that starting some quick-and-dirty thing in shell scripts is great, but once I get to around 100 lines of shell script code, I'm better off switching to python (or similar). Similarly, once I get to around 1000 lines of python code, I'm better off switching to compiled, statically typed language (e.g., Java, C, C++, etc.).

So my own heuristic has become:

    shell script when

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

#124

Post by tluyben2 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #116
tluyben2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well... Compared to others it is still very conservative. And backward compatibility is taken into account for many projects.

I too find it annoying that everything feels like early 00s as it prevents uptake; I think most can be fixed by creating a new, modern website for the project, adding examples how to interact with the system with modern tools and a 'try it out in your browser'. Many Apache projects, for instance, are great and very robust in the current time, however, when you go there to do research on what to use for a new project, the examples start with XML files and then Java classes. No matter what I think of node, examples these days must include a little few-liner with node, python, go, curl, java, clojure, ... . Most people like the idea of java -jar somethinggreat.jar, but opening IntelliJ, adding all kinds of arcane (when you are used to Go, Node, etc) artifacts and then writing actual Java code which you did not want to do in the first place, really hurts adoption imho. And made many projects not even appear on anyone's radar.

Like (anecdotally) picking mongo for a (trading) case geode was basically made for, but mongo was hip, not 'old apache' and not 'old java'.

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

#125

Post by fulafel »

dekhn wrote: post #107
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've used 'import gc' in python programs. gc.get_referers and gc.get_referents is very helpful.

gc.get_stats() too.

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

#126

Post by rantwasp »

iainctduncan wrote: post #117
cashewchoo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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.

that’s a logical fallacy. chances are that if they used Java or C# they might be dead by now (ie it sucks but usually it’s a good problem to have)

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

#127

Post by vips7L »

iainctduncan wrote: post #117
cashewchoo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> I'm writing some Java at the moment for an Android app, and it's just killing me after doing Scheme and Python

Android isn't Java though. It's some frankenstein contraption made from a mutated version of Java from a decade ago.

> I were starting my own business now, I'd use Clojure or Scala.

I personally wouldn't ever choose Scala for anything. It's tooling is horrible (Sbt is a special hell, and scalac is as slow as a C++ compiler).

I'm currently in a code base like you describe, scala core with a switch to Java. It's not fun. Were stuck with these legacy library and framework choices that don't fit into the Java ecosystem and it slows down development considerably.

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

#128

Post by iainctduncan »

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…

"import" as a replacement for a singleton, such a loaded gun. :-(

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

#129

Post by timbit42 »

Frost1x wrote: post #28
learnstats2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logo is still very commonly used in early educational settings - maybe not typically for engineering applications, but I'm confident it has far more people using it than the other languages you list.

I recently had to use logo when migrating a model to another platform someone originally wrote in a flavor of logo. It's a mess.

The Logo code was a mess, or the Logo language is a mess?

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

#130

Post by alyandon »

neverartful wrote: post #123
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've often found that starting some quick-and-dirty thing in shell scripts is great, but once I get to around 100 lines of shell script code, I'm better off switching to python (or similar). Similarly, once I get to around 1000 lines of python code, I'm better off switching to compiled, statically typed language (e.g., Java, C, C++, etc.). So my own heuristic has become: shell script when

I live by very suspiciously similar rules of thumb although my tolerance in the past for dynamic scripting languages was probably closer to several hundred lines of code.

However, I have to acknowledge that modern IDEs (and even advanced code editors like VSCode) have pretty good support for dynamic scripting languages these days that make working with them in larger code bases not entirely painful.

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