361–370 of 856 posts
TL;DW: The presenter mentions that Python experienced a slow but consistent growth trend, leading to its current prominence. Other points he highlighted about its success align with much of the sentiment expressed here.
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)…
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. This is so hilariously wrong in python though
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would dispute that. I always felt Rails was used by a very communicative subset of web developers while the Django users just contracted, delivered, got paid and moved on to the next project without any hassle.
Many comments have commented on the ecosystem, but I've thought a big reason behind python's success is that it's also a well designed language in terms of readability and lack of surprise. My background was in perl and shell scripting before finding python and the absolute beautiful form of the language (that whitespace is significant in more ways than one!) and its utter insistence that There's One And Only One Obv…
From the external POV that's one of my pet peeves with the Python which also soaks into other aspects of the community. Python community seems almost religious and sort of self-righteous about how Python was designed and how things should be done. Other language communities are more open to (self-)criticism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
For people who are wandering like me, the big jump in Django searches was the release of Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino on Dec 25, 2012.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I imagine you have that perspective because you started less than 20 years ago. In some ways the idea of the Pythonic Way to do things evolved in opposition to Perl's vigorous advocacy of More Than One Way. Python has been really winning for some time, so it's natural that its ideological discipline has grown ragged. The crop of kids who value options above consistency don't have the scars of the Perl age to infor…
> But Python is -dramatically- better focused, as a community, on finding a Pythonic way to proceed, and then advocating it, than previous cultures. I would revise that to be that the pythonic culture of one acceptable way to to is better matched with a lot of good development practices. Perl was also very good at finding a Perl way to proceed. It's just that with Perl that often mean a lot of implicitness and "do wh…
They loved it so much that they made homework-solving numerical libraries. They turned into numpy.
At some point, almost every undergraduate and most of finance industry was churning python. Python 3 was released. People hated that. Microsoft was interested. Guido started following modern languages. Asyncio was buggy. Pandas was built. Django was jealous of Rails. Not much happened for a while. AI! CNNs! Deep neural networks! Alpha go beat everyone. Tensorflow! Suddenly everyone did pip install. Cuda, pytorch. Ruby got left behind. Asyncio got fixed.
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 f…
I'd argue that better relative ergonomics had diddly squat effect on Python's current position. It's first mover advantage, plain and simple. It got its hooks in data science like JavaScript got its in the browser. I can say that personally using Ruby, Python felt like a massive step backward. I can see how others might disagree, but I feel like it's all in what you know first. On a certain level, most of us know Jav…
I'd agree with that. I've done a lot of work in Python and Ruby. I mostly do Python these days. I think Ruby's ergonomics were better, especially for novices. (E.g., if you want to know what methods you can call on an object, in Ruby you can just look at the object, but in Python there are a whole zoo of global functions you're supposed to know about. [1]) But I think ergonomics just don't matter much when compared with more practical considerations like availability of libraries or number of developers available to hire.
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 I understand is that Python was popular in the anglosphere as a general purpose language first, Ruby was somewhat popular in Japan earlier as a general purpose language but didn't become popular in the anglosphere until Rails.
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)…
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. This is so hilariously wrong in python though