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Ask HN: Why did Python win?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#61

Post by paulddraper »

capableweb wrote: post #58
paulddraper wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Fair enough, my information is outdated.

StackOverflow agrees. [1]

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=django%2Cruby...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#62

Post by vodou »

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…

> except for rejecting PEP 355 which was a big mistake

Looks like you are the author of PEP 355. Well, we got pathlib in the end. It's not that bad.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#64

Post by tiberious726 »

Someone wrote: post #9

> My impression is that in the ‘00s, Python and Ruby were both relatively new They were, but Python is close to 5 years older than Ruby (February 1991 vs December 1995), so in the ‘00s, Python was significantly older than Ruby. Ruby also was more or less a Japanese-only thing until around 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)#Ea... : “In 1999, the first English language mailing list ruby-tal…

Early on, at least English speaking ruby had an extremely poor culture around documentation. Code was barely commented and "the ruby way" was to use single character variable names

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#65

Post by throwawa14223 »

I have never encountered a language as easy to pick up and do cool stuff with as Ruby is. Even after years of working with it I still find Python to be a bit of a mess. I think there was an article years ago about how some people liking a product means it is going to die? I'm pretty sure that is me for technology.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#66

Post by zdw »

There's a joke that is roughly "Python is not the best language for any particular task, but is nearly always the second best language for that task" - it's a jack of all trades language.

Because of this, lots of people learned Python, and then applied it in many different areas, and it just became more prevalent and useful.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#67

Post by moonchrome »

Ruby was never similar in popularity to Python. It was just a fad in webdev circles. I've rarely seen ruby before RoR and I've seen python all over.

Python was popular as a teaching language, how it gained a foothold in academia.

I remember 20 years ago when I was starting out it was popular for game scripting (Lua was more embeddable but python was also used). plenty of first class interfacing methods to native code (still remember c++ boost shipping python binding generator).

Many tools shipped python as an embedded scripting language.

Python was used for creating build systems.

Not to mention any distro out there ships python, it replaced perl in that regard. Batteries included and being available helped it become the norm for random scripting.

Python was big before numpy/ML.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#68

Post by worik »

tobinfricke wrote: post #49

When I first encountered Python, it was as an alternative to Perl. Given the choice between Perl and Python, I think it's clear why the latter won out.

> When I first encountered Python, it was as an alternative to Perl.

Me too

I am amazed that Python won out against Perl

Perl is much easier to use. Does not have the incredibly irritating treatment of whitespace

Perl was a disrupter, whereas Python was "computer sciencey". A false dichotomy but it really mattered to people

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#70

Post by fictkgyicf »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #65

I have never encountered a language as easy to pick up and do cool stuff with as Ruby is. Even after years of working with it I still find Python to be a bit of a mess. I think there was an article years ago about how some people liking a product means it is going to die? I'm pretty sure that is me for technology.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/certain-customers-sp...
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