171–180 of 856 posts
I don't know why Python has outshined its contemporaries like Perl, PHP, Java and Ruby. It has done a great job, and there is probably much to be admired.
Python is good enough at everything.
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.
If you wanted to do something there was probably already a Python lib for it. Nothing else had such a rich library ecosystem. If you really need python to perform it is usually easy enough to write the needed routines in a lower level language link it in.
Python grew because it was so easy and powerful enough. Now that python loads are getting into substantial computing the efficiency is becoming an issue.
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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...
Before then Zope (on which the popular Plone CMS was built) was probably the most widely used web framework in Python. But there were many, many others too.
Python's old as dirt; it even predates Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python Sometimes the key to success is to just be adequate for a really long time.
Python 0.9.0 February 1991
Linux 0.01 Sept 17, 1991
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…
Before Python got popular, Perl was the most similar popular language. Once I encountered Python, I felt, this is Perl, but done right.
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…
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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…
Ruby has implicit return values for methods, but unless I'm wrong, so does Python.