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Ask HN: Why did Python win?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#141

Post by kyllo »

dizhn wrote: post #95
peatmoss wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it upset the Perl hegemony in part because of the enterprise infatuation with object orientation. Perl got a lot of flak from the Java/XML crowd (“Perl’s not a real language—it’s not object oriented!”). You could kind of write Java in Python, and thus a certain kind of enterprise techie couldn’t dismiss Python as “just” a scripting language.

The word "enterprise" kind of reminded me of one possible significant reason for python's huge adoption rate after the second part of the 2000s. Google started using it for a lot of things at some point and was advertising a ton of python jobs. That was both a shining endorsement and a possible way into the company.

I actually think Google picked the winner by deciding to use Python, especially for TensorFlow, right at the time when deep learning really started taking off, and also at a time when they were seen as the leader in engineering best practices that other companies wanted to emulate.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#142

Post by ketralnis »

There's pretty much never a "why". Fashion is fashion.

You can look back at some things that occured and say "well it's because it's easy" or whatever, but to be rigourous you'd have to also apply that to the languages that _didn't_ win, and the reasons that they didn't win to Python, and at best there's loose correlation.

This is the same as people that point to "why" billionaires are billionaires. There's a whole lot of luck to it that you can't discount.

Further, I'd question the premise. It's clearly the first thing that people reach for in ML and in the top 3 for web backends. But it hasn't always been that way and it won't always be. Programmers have way too much ADD and contrarianism for any such state of affairs to last for long. And in other spaces and even in other social circles it would be unheard of.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#144

Post by local_person »

cutler wrote: post #122
moonchrome wrote: post #67

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…

You're forgetting the period of Ruby's popularity in the devops world, especially Chef and Puppet.

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#145

Post by dannyobrien »

This maybe chicken-and-egg, but Google standardised very early on on Python (along with Java and C++) for their internal work, and sponsored a lot of the open source infrastructure. So even though Ruby attracted a lot of attention for a big chunk of time, there was no diminishing in the baseline popularity and functioning of the Python ecosystem.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#147

Post by JAlexoid »

jacobgorm wrote: post #63

Same reason Pascal lost to C. Life is too short for BEGIN and END.

Not really. C(not C++) is better organized to understand how it will run on the CPU and how memory is allocated.

Software engineers are engineers primarily, so we care about where our thing is going to run.

Remember that Pascal was supposed to be 100% portable across platforms?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#148

Post by adamrezich »

CTmystery wrote: post #136
moonchrome wrote: post #67

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…

I'll bite on "just a fad in webdev circles", in case you are serious and not trolling. Railsworld is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rails this year. As I'm sure you know, Rails is built on Ruby. 20 years does not fit my definition of fad.

I don't think moonchrome was disparaging Rails or minimizing its popularity, but, rather pointing out that Ruby is only as popular as it is because of webdev, because of Rails (and the Rails-likes that came after)—outside of that specific niche, it's not very commonly used just about anywhere else, especially when compared to Python.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#149

Post by lordnacho »

aidenn0 wrote: post #31

I first encountered Python around 2000. At the time Perl was more popular in the circles I frequented, and TCL probably about as popular as Python (eggdrop[1] notwitstanding), but Python was growing steadily. I encountered Ruby in the late '00s (as others have noted it made its english-language debut almost a decade after Python started) and Lua was another contender during this time. My memory is that, at least outs…

> The syntax is almost a dead-ringer for pseudo code.

This is the big one. You look at it, and you think you know what it's going to do. The indentation rules also means things look predictable rather than being a mess of brackets.

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