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Ask HN: Why did Python win?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#51

Post by paulddraper »

huevosabio wrote: post #4

Python grew out of a myriad of applications that built on hard to replicate components, while Ruby relied only on web development which is remarkably subject to fashion. Python is very simple making it easy to learn. Thus, it became more and more popular for fields where programming is not the main task, like science. It is also very easy to extend with C. So, these fields could bolt on time-tested scientific code in…

> Ruby relied only on web development

Chef, Puppet, Vagrant, Logstash, etc are not web development.

Ruby dominated (dominates?) DevOps tooling.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#52

Post by PartiallyTyped »

bjourne wrote: post #20

It has very little to do with Python itself. Python won because GvR ran an extremely tight ship. And there were many extremely talented core developers that helped make Python a polished product. The development team made all the right decisions, except for rejecting PEP 355 which was a big mistake. The batteries included approach helped grow the ecosystem. Developers wrote third party libraries in the hopes of them…

> PEP 355

Didn't this eventually become what is now pathlib (which I am a big fan of) ?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#53

Post by r_thambapillai »

Python ended up 'specializing' in data contexts, thanks to Numpy / Pandas, and as a result, ended up becoming the first exposure to programming than anyone doing data stuff had. That was millions of people. In that space, it had no competitors.

Ruby ended up 'specializing' in web dev, because of Rails. But when Node and React came out, Ruby on Rails had to compete with Nodejs + React / MERN as a way of building a web app. Since people first learning programming to build a web app would usually start with javascript anyway (since a lot of very first projects might not even need a backend), it was a lot easier for the Nodejs/React route to become the default path. Whereas if you were a data scientist, you started on python, and as you got better, you basically just kept using python.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#56

Post by jmugan »

I moved from Matlab to Python in grad school once my thesis program got too big. It's open, which beats Wolfram. You don't have to manage memory, which beats C/C++. And it has a lot less boilerplate than System.out.println('Java').

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#57

Post by paulddraper »

r_thambapillai wrote: post #53

Python ended up 'specializing' in data contexts, thanks to Numpy / Pandas, and as a result, ended up becoming the first exposure to programming than anyone doing data stuff had. That was millions of people. In that space, it had no competitors. Ruby ended up 'specializing' in web dev, because of Rails. But when Node and React came out, Ruby on Rails had to compete with Nodejs + React / MERN as a way of building a web…

> In that space, it had no competitors.

Well, there's R.

But basically, yes that's the long and short of it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#58

Post by capableweb »

paulddraper wrote: post #50
Scarblac wrote: post #28

Python got Numpy very early on, and other languages never got an equivalent. And then lots of things were built on top of Numpy - image processing, reading GIS raster data, scipy, pandas, etc etc - and they're all trivial to combine because it's all just Numpy arrays. Python also had a very friendly and approachable community from the start, and great docs, while Ruby had its documentation in Japanese only for some t…

Rails is far, far more popular than Django. However, the significance of both declined with the expansion of high-tech options (Spring, Go, Scala, Node.js) and the expansion of low-tech options (Firebase). So today the popularity of the backend frameworks of each language are less important.

> Rails is far, far more popular than Django.

Maybe it used to, but seems a lot more people at least searches for Django pretty much everywhere except US, Canda and Japan.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#59

Post by tiberious726 »

paulddraper wrote: post #51
huevosabio wrote: post #4

Python grew out of a myriad of applications that built on hard to replicate components, while Ruby relied only on web development which is remarkably subject to fashion. Python is very simple making it easy to learn. Thus, it became more and more popular for fields where programming is not the main task, like science. It is also very easy to extend with C. So, these fields could bolt on time-tested scientific code in…

> Ruby relied only on web development Chef, Puppet, Vagrant, Logstash, etc are not web development. Ruby dominated (dominates?) DevOps tooling.

Back in 2012 there was no question that ruby was the language of DevOps, then Ansible took over. Puppet was a true pain to work with, and through at least version 4, their language designers were simply wrong about what it meant to be a declarative language (you could only declare each resource once, they pretended/falsely believed that inference and/or unification were incompatible with declarative languages), but wow was it powerful to maintain dependable state on long lived servers

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#60

Post by izacus »

yCombLinks wrote: post #13
beardyw wrote: post #7

No language ever won. When I started COBOL had won, not so today. Over the years various languages have won. Python is popular today for many but not all applications. That's about all you can say.

Python is clearly the current winner. Not sure being pedantic about what it means to be a winner adds anything

If there's a winner, it's still named "Java".
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