Serious answer: the Zen of Python. It makes for a far better version of Ruby
Ask HN: Why did Python win?
261–270 of 856 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
numpy exists (somewhat indirectly) because matlab cost $$$. and now numpy is a far larger use of matlab's concepts than matlab will ever be. I haven't seen anything an "A-type" data scientist needs in R/SAS/SPSS that was intrinsic to the language and couldn't be ported to Python. I don't want a "data/scientific" language, or a "web" language, or a "UI" language- I want one language that explicitly supports all the us…
Matlab has a more interesting dispatch model than python though. (Mathematica has even better dispatch but I haven't used it in almost 20 years at this point) Julia's model is even better, but I just never have time to dig into it deeply enough to get to the zen of Julia. One day when I have time to understand Julia I'd like to, but it's hard to compete with the reliability of python just always working.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before Python got popular, Perl was the most similar popular language. Once I encountered Python, I felt, this is Perl, but done right.
That was my experience. I like Perl. I'm comfortable with Perl. And after about a day of Python, I never wrote another line of new Perl code. There were so many "it can't possibly be that easy, but it is!" moments. Let's write a function to add five to a number: def add_five(num): return num + 5 OK. So, can I pass that function as an argument to another function? def call(func, value): return func(value) call(add_fiv…
That sounds trivial? I mean, you can do that in C, what’s surprising about it?
I have never found Python as nice to use as you seem to have, but Ruby always fit like a glove. I’ve written Python since 1999 and I still would rather use almost anything else. It’s so labored to do anything complex. You can build worlds in Ruby in the time it takes you to align indentation properly for a single class in Python.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?
#264To me Ruby syntax looks too magic. Python is much more simple to understand, a person that doens't know python but another language such as C or Java can write programs in like 10 minutes. The only "strange" thing is the use of indentation for dividing blocks, but it's something you easily learn in 2 minutes.
Another thing that helped python is the fact that you can do fairly low-level operations in a very high level language. Python gives you os-level API/system calls that otherwise you would need to use a language like C to have access to. This makes python great to do system programming: indeed a lot of system tools in Linux where performance is not critical are written in python. For this reason you can assume any Linux/UNIX system has a python interpreter, and thus a lot of scripts and tools started to be written in python.
It's also quite easy to call C code from python code, and vice versa (for this reason python is used as a scripts/plugin engine in programs written in other languages). This is the reason a lot of scientific calculation tools are written in python, since they have the algorithms implemented in C for maximum performance with a python API to be able to be used easily.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl and python have opposite philosophies with regards to standards. Python prefers a standard "pythonic" way, while perl had its "there is more than one way to do it". It would seem that having a standard is more popular.
Yeah, there's the ongoing Perl joke about writing a script that works today, but not understanding how it works tomorrow. Too much one-liner type stuff that did not allow for maintainability
That’s any code I haven’t looked at for a while, to be honest. I can’t count how many times I’ve looked at code I wrote or bug tickets I fixed and have absolutely no memory of doing it. It’s almost like the act of committing flushes the local storage in my brain.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?
#266> 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…
> Ruby also was more or less a Japanese-only thing until around 2000 And after that it still took quite a few years until "English support" really became first-class and comparable to Python. I looked at Ruby around 2002-2003 or so (I was looking at many different languages back then, pretty much anything I could get my hands on), and lots of Ruby stuff was in Japanese or poor English. That's all fine, but I specific…
Ruby’s English documentation remains terrible, unfortunately.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?
#267What many others here are saying is correct. Python was fairly popular, and considered a great language that good developers wanted to develop in, way before Ruby became popular.
Just look at this article by Paul Graham, written in 2004, called "The Python Paradox" http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html:
> I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.
> Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire.
This was written more or less at the same time that Ruby on Rails was first released. Clearly by then, people had known about Python for a while.
That head-start led it to be more popular early on, except in webdev circles specifically. But in the other circles, and especially in Academia, Python was gaining popularity, which helped it both get lots of great scientific libraries (making it today's default "data" language), and also made it eventually become a language taught in Universities.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?
#268Earlier 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)…
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. This is so hilariously wrong in python though
That was the one mantra from the zen of python that I always laugh at too.
Because my #1 complaint with python is that there are so many ways to do the same thing. It sounds nice in theory if you are a new developer because you can create your own voice in python and character.
For example, lets say I gave a simple coding puzzle (think leetcode) to 10 python engineers. I would get at least 8 different responses. A few might gravitate around similar concepts but they would be significantly different.
By comparison if I gave the same puzzle to some Go engineers, all of the responses would be probably very close to identical.
This sounds fun as a new engineer, like this is an argument for using Python. But as you get older and more experienced you will likely find yourself hating the flexibility of python because as you scan any decent size codebases, you start to be able to identify entire parts of the codebase and who wrote them, without even needing to do a git blame.
I am currently an SRE manager who works in a very polyglot environment (primarily Node/js, bash/sh, python, and Golang with just enough java thrown in to ruin your day). When I read through python codebases, I can identify exactly who wrote it, even past employees. Then when you need to fix it, you often have to adapt to that style as you fix a bug or add an updated feature. This is a little true with Bash because you will see certain engineers always lean towards sed and others towards awk and grep to solve problems depending on their strength, but it is less significant. However, in our Go codebases, everyone writes nearly identical code.
I've been writing Python for over a decade and I still learn new features of the language every week or month. Just this week I had to dive into the `ast` library (abstract syntax trees) which was a native module I haven't ever touched before. By contrast, I haven't had to learn any new core syntax and tools of Go and Bash in a long time. You have a fairly small set of syntax and that's it. The power comes in how you use that small set of tools, not learning a new language module.
Again, the infinite flexibility sounds nice. But in a corporate environment the strictness of other languages is actually a benefit because it keeps everyone following the same path.
I truly believe the mantra from zen of python:
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it
Sadly, Python lost this tradition far before I ever became acquainted with the language. And the python3.10+ mentality of supporting everything forever is only going to make it worse overtime.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google followed the writing on the wall, nothing else.
Google was known as one of the most academic engineering companies, in the 00-ies.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?
#270Because it managed to produce frictionless adoption in academia. All the rest is downstream of that. MVPs in entrepreneurial initiatives are done with that. RESTful APIs are based on the prototypes that come from academia. Good libraries for data processing of lots of data required by academic studies became easily adopted there. So a less-effort/easiest-convenience law inside academia made it win.
BTW, if you enjoy Ruby, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGaKZBr0ga4&t=705s