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Ask HN: Why did Python win?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#161

Post by earthboundkid »

zdw wrote: post #66

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.

I think that's part of the answer. Python has multiple independent communities of use: web, data science, ML, devops. Most languages only have one or two ecosystems of use.

I think the other part of Python's success compared to JS is a better story about C integration. Python itself is just a series of macros to make C nicer to use, which meant the existing C/C++ ecosystem was relatively easy to integrate. And then the sci-py world also brought in Fortran. JS is huge on the backend web, but it hasn't spread into other ecosystems nearly as much because the C integration story isn't as good.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#163

Post by rcarmo »

dgellow wrote: post #109
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…

To add to your comment, the web space was also already very crowded, with PHP, C#/ASP, whatever Java people were using, Django, etc. Rails has always been fairly niche compared to giants like PHP.

People like to hate on PHP (and to be honest I really never enjoyed it), but there was a time when if you wanted to build powerful, large scale websites (or hosting, or scalable web farm deployments) it was the most reliable and performant thing short of Java.

It also helped that the PHP ecosystem had some pretty solid and battle tested HTTP components and pretty productive frameworks--server-side rendering with Varnish was as fast as a CDN-backed site feels today.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#164

Post by krackers »

taylodl wrote: post #127

Python was developed in the late 80's and first released in 1991 - it's been around awhile. One of the things that always made it useful before it became so popular is its great interop with C/C++. Ultimately that interop led to NumPy and SciPy, which allowed you to use a rather simple language and yet get high performance when doing calculations. That, as they say, was that. It doesn't hurt that Python is a multi pa…

>Java JIT compilation optimizations that's been applied to Python interpreted code

I thought CPython doesn't JIT at all? What optimizations are you referring to

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#165

Post by Buttons840 »

What concepts does a language force a new user to be aware of, and how reliable are user's first intuitions about those concepts?

I would argue that Python dominates Ruby in this metric.

New users wonder how to call functions. They form an intuition ("use parenthesis"), but it's unreliable. "Oh, parenthesis are optional--oh, parenthesis are only optional sometimes".

New users wonder what a function is exactly. They form an intuition, but their initial intuition doesn't encompass all 7 different types of callables in Ruby, so many surprises and frustrations await.

Python is much more boring in this respect, users are more likely to form accurate intuitions.

What follows is my subjective experience as I came to like Python but hate Ruby: I learned Python in the mid 2000's while trying to script Asterisk. Asterisk had an existing community around PHP and Ruby, so I looked at Python, PHP, and Ruby with fresh eyes, Python appealed to me most. I remember being very confused about what Ruby "gems" were, I thought they were something like "JavaEE" that I'd heard about in passing at school, some kind of compiler plugins or something complicated. Python had "libraries" though, I knew what they were. I didn't seek out learning materials for the languages, I only saw how people were talking about them in the Asterisk community. I'm sure the right material would have explained what a "gem" was very well, but those obscure mailing lists I was reading did not. I never did give Ruby a fair shake, so don't take this as advice, these were merely my experiences as a new programmer looking at both languages with fresh eyes.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#166

Post by ysavir »

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 think they meant back before either Ruby or Python hit their stride, not afterwards.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#167

Post by WhyCause »

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…

> Many tools shipped python as an embedded scripting language.

I had dabbled with Python before encountering it (in its embedded form), but once I started using it inside ESRI's ArcGIS software, it became my go to language for many, many tasks.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#168

Post by rcarmo »

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.

Puppet was pretty awesome. We used it to maintain and provision nearly every kind of software across a few thousand machines, even though it had a worrying tendency to remove user accounts (we once got locked out of the master...)

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#169

Post by kstrauser »

CTmystery wrote: post #130
dmazzoni wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Only one of the items in your "such as" list is unique to python's philosophy, and that is "there should be one way to do it". Ruby embraces the many ways to accomplish something, it's true. However, the three others are not unique to python. Ruby especially embraces "readability counts". And I can't think of anything in the ruby language itself that is implicit over explicit. Perhaps you are thinking of rails and co…

For me, the Ruby community's comfort with monkey patching was a big turn off. In Python, you can hack around on class and replace its methods, but if you do, it's expected that your coworkers might stick you in a dunk tank and sell tickets. It's just not the thing that's done.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#170

Post by Gualdrapo »

dylan604 wrote: post #113
dmazzoni wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I knew about Python in 2006 or so when got into Linux, and at that time (when Python 2 was a thing, iirc it just came out) it was very popular between the FOSS world for doing apps and GUIs (I even toyed a lot with PyGTK), whereas I felt Perl was much more about more "serious" stuff like text processing and kind of a sh language with steroids. I just barely heard about Ruby and wasn't sure what it was its purpose - I just heard about its "gems" but not about Rails. Still as both Python and Perl were FOSS I supposed their niche and user base were going to be around it, as many things FOSS at the time.

At 2008 I started my graphic design studies and I just pretty had to forgot about programming (which in hindsight if I had kept doing it I would have a very strong programming background and maybe my life would be much better now, but it is what it is) - but was very surprised to discover around 2011 or so that it seemed _everyone_ was using Python. Like I just blinked and it took over the world somehow.

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