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

#211

Post by pydry » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #199

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…

> But if you let a team of juniors do whatever seems like a good idea, with nobody calling the shots who understands tech debt and the large-scale architecture problems, the mess that can be made is staggering. In the several years I spent doing .NET consulting, I believe that this is the crux of the problem, and not Python per se. In .NET land (probably Enterprise Java too), this often manifests as an apparent goal…

I was about to say, I'd like to know which language juniors don't make a mess of.

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

#212

Post by squar1sm » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

neurostimulant wrote: post #159

didip wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This precise struggle is why Go is created, and also why Rob Pike said what he said. The industry needs a statically typed language with good ergonomics (not typing too much) and performant. I agree with you, asking everyone to be discipline with their code in a dynamic language is a bit too much to ask (unfortunately).

If there is something similar with Django on golang ecosystem, I would use golang more. Battery-included web framework seem to be out of style these days and no one invest in developing one for newer language like golang. As a single developer working mostly alone, microservice-based development is quite painful.

Gobuffalo is close but it's been a while since I've looked at it. What you said is has been my experience too.

Here I go about the batteries included vs micro thing. People pick Flask because it looks approachable but then DIY features in. The same thing happens with Sinatra+Rails. If the python ecosystem grows and other communities come in, maybe they will bring their culture and standards in.

Take poetry for python. It's basically, "hey ... cargo/yarn/mix/bundler all kind of figured out these ergonomics". Poetry's "why" section in the README really resonated with me. Cross pollination of ideas across tribes is _good_.

But then, I'm biased/blub-paradox of course. And it's definitely in line with the productivity/DSLs/rapid vs types/verbosity/slower modes discussion.

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

#213

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

import wrote: post #175

iainctduncan wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Androidifed Java is the worst thing you can deal to be honest.

Can you just use Kotlin to avoid Android's Java, or are there instances where you need to dip into Java get stuff done?

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

#214

Post by uses » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

I got back into python recently and one thing that really confused me: there's no good way to manage packages, apparently? Meaning: if someone clones my repo, there's no single, correct way for me to have specified the dependencies in a machine-readable format, so they can run the equivalent of "npm install", and get things working. Is that really true?

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

#215

Post by pkolaczk » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

vips7L wrote: post #127

iainctduncan wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ... and scalac is as slow as a C++ compiler

Scalac is as fast as Javac if you don't overuse Scala-specific features which are known to compile slowly - implicits and macros. But it is unfair to use these features and than complain on compile speed or compare it to a language that doesn't offer similar feature set.

Also, in our Java/Scala project it turned out that Scala+Bloop was way faster (10x-100x) at incremental compilation than Java+Gradle. Bloop is based on SBT libraries so there are some things that SBT does right.

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

#216

Post by hota_mazi » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:33 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…

> Sure, this is a problem of people, not language.

I don't think so. It is a problem of language.

Or more specifically, of dynamically typed languages (DTL) vs/ statically typed ones (STL).

We know for a fact now that DTL's simply don't scale to large code bases. And before dozens of people tell me there are a lot of large apps written in DTL, this doesn't mean it was a good idea in the first place nor that these large apps are easy to maintain and improve (they're not and they would be much easier to maintain and improve with type annotations).

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

#217

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

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

This was my heuristic years ago before Python got type annotation support. Now there are linters that take type annotations into account, and LSP servers that can catch type errors as you write Python code.

I've found that using Python for large projects is both fine and productive as long as you utilize type annotations and modules. Ambiguity goes out the window when you do that.

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

#218

Post by fortran77 » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #139

slashdev wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They rank C number 1. There is no way that reflects reality. JavaScript is easily number one for reasons that will surprise nobody. On the WakaTime public leaderboards it dominates to such an extent that I think programmers spend more time writing JavaScript than all the other languages combined. I don't know if that generalizes to the broader population, but it gives one an idea how ubiquitous it is.

I can't actually say what the popularity of C/C++ is. But I don't know what you do for a living but in general Hackernews tends to have webdev tunnel vision. Embedded, operating system development, browser development, OS, driver dev, games, telecoms, compilers, lots of IoT, systems development generally, all of this is in C/C++, and will be for the forseeable future. That is a lot of lines of code, but mostly invisi…

I do most of my work in C/C++. There's a ton of it in every microwave oven, washing machine, car, telephone, device driver, etc.

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

#219

Post by czardoz » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

uses wrote: post #214

I got back into python recently and one thing that really confused me: there's no good way to manage packages, apparently? Meaning: if someone clones my repo, there's no single, correct way for me to have specified the dependencies in a machine-readable format, so they can run the equivalent of "npm install", and get things working. Is that really true?

No, look up "pip"

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

#220

Post by aeturnum » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

Like many people here, I've worked on large python deploys for most of my professional career and have, over time, come to see python's downsides more clearly.

I also wonder, thinking back over my experiences and reading others here, if we are mis-ordering how these things come to be. Maybe it's not that python codebases are, for a given line count, worse than other languages. Maybe it's that python allows teams to continue using practices that aren't suited to their current scale longer than other languages. The reason that we all have seen hulking, monstrous, nearly unworkable python code bases is that most other languages would have already collapsed under the mismatch between approach and desired outcome.

I think we often approach software engineering as a puzzle - where you have a set of inputs (a too-large codebase, for instance) and a question of how to a better state. But programming projects are path-dependent creatures. Huge codebases must develop over time - they don't spring out of the heads of developers fully formed. If you were a typed language and your engineers had a lower LOC output per-day, then of course your code base will be smaller. Is that better? You iterate more slowly, but the scale of your code is also more manageable. In my experience, the challenge of large python code bases comes from the context that you need to understand from the surrounding environment: what are all these objects, what are their objects, etc. Typed languages force you to carry around more context, so any given function is easier to read, but you can still write un-navigatable code.