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Ask HN: Why did Python win?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#111

Post by cutler »

masklinn wrote: post #74
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…

> Python ended up 'specializing' in data contexts, thanks to Numpy / Pandas Yeah it was a success 20 years in the making, had a fair amount of input from science men and that being GvR’s background he responded positively e.g. the extended slices (striding) and ability to index with an unparenthesised tuple (multidimensional indexing) were very much added for the convenience of numpy’s ancestors. I would not say it h…

Why probably wrong? Bioperl was very big in the bioinformatics world.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#113

Post by dylan604 »

dmazzoni wrote: post #91
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…

I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first. After all, there was a reason people put so much effort into writing Numpy in the first place. I think a lot of people were attracted to the language design, as captured in the Zen of Python ( https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ ), such as: Explicit is better than implicit. Readability counts. Errors should never pass silently (unless explicitly silenced)…

>I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first.

What were their choices though, Perl? It's easy to see why Perl lost out. Other than PHP, I don't really know of any other JIT scripting languages they could have chosen.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#114

Post by Loeffelmann »

dmazzoni wrote: post #91
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…

I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first. After all, there was a reason people put so much effort into writing Numpy in the first place. I think a lot of people were attracted to the language design, as captured in the Zen of Python ( https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ ), such as: Explicit is better than implicit. Readability counts. Errors should never pass silently (unless explicitly silenced)…

> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

This is so hilariously wrong in python though

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#115

Post by vmchale »

Python manages to have decent performance because NumPy uses an APL-like model and it happens to skirt the design flaws (dynamic typing, interpreted). J for instance has a tree-walking interpreter written in C that performs well!

Ruby's poor performance hobbles it even in places it's supposed to be good (twitter was rewritten to Scala over rails).

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#116

Post by deadmutex »

qsort wrote: post #76
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…

Numpy is certainly amazing, but there are tons of competitors in the data/scientific space, which pure "A-type" data scientists tend to prefer: R, SSPS, Matlab... The difference is that Python doesn't entirely suck as a general-purpose language. Sure, you might have better options, but it's still reasonable to write almost anything in Python. Other scripting languages like Ruby, JS and Lua are probably a little bit b…

Matlab costs $$. Matlab was ahead in perf for a long time, not sure now. E.g. they used to JIT code, etc.

Comparing python to R, python feels like a much more mature language. R always seemed only useful for small scale projects, e.g. writing some script to process data with < 20 lines of code. Python codebases just scale much better.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#117

Post by umutisik »

I don't see this mentioned often: One thing that interpreted languages like Python have over compiled languages is that all libraries have to be open-source by default (unless they are wrappers). It makes it a lot easier to debug and put in minor fixes on the fly.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#119

Post by stevesimmons »

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…

> Python also came in an msi installer and made the Windows experience pleasant

For a long time, the official Windows Python distribution was overshadowed by ActiveState's, called ActivePython. That included more Windows-specific packages such as win32com, and the very capable PythonWin IDE from Mark Hammond. That was my go-to Python around 2000-2005.

ActiveState was also notable in the early 2000s for hosting the Python Cookbook, the main repository of useful Python snippets and scripts. This was long before PyPI, StackOverflow and Github.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#120

Post by masklinn »

cutler wrote: post #111
masklinn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python ended up 'specializing' in data contexts, thanks to Numpy / Pandas Yeah it was a success 20 years in the making, had a fair amount of input from science men and that being GvR’s background he responded positively e.g. the extended slices (striding) and ability to index with an unparenthesised tuple (multidimensional indexing) were very much added for the convenience of numpy’s ancestors. I would not say it h…

Why probably wrong? Bioperl was very big in the bioinformatics world.

> Why probably wrong?

Because I don’t have a great memory and I was never into Perl so I was extremely unsure of the suggestion and didn’t want it to come across as an assertion.

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