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Ask HN: Why did Python win?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#681

Post by lelanthran »

cutler wrote: post #428
mdbauman wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I decided it was time to add a scripting language, Perl and Python seemed like the obvious choices, and in my mind were equally good options. I asked my best friend which I should choose, and he more or less said, "You can't go wrong with either one, but when you ask for help Perl people are assholes and Python people are nice." I can't confirm his thoughts on Perl and I haven't interacted much with Ruby, b…

I can't imagine Python's welcoming community has anything to do with it. If anything it was Ruby that had a reputation for being the most welcoming community with its MINASWAN (cringe) philosophy.

> I can't imagine Python's welcoming community has anything to do with it. If anything it was Ruby that had a reputation for being the most welcoming community with its MINASWAN (cringe) philosophy.

TBH, community had nothing to do with Python's enormous success over its competitors (Perl, and Ruby. Possibly Tcl too.).

Nor did any technical merit, nor ergonomics.

There's one, and only one, reason why Python exploded at the expense of the other competitors: The ease and acceptance of using the language as glue for C functions.

Python's popularity is built on a solid foundation compatibility with C.

If, in the 90s, C++ had taken off enough to displace C, I doubt Python would be as popular as it is. Python owes its ubiquity to C, because if C was not ubiquitous, Python wouldn't be either.

(It's only recently, like the last 10 year or so, that I started seeing popular Python programs which didn't have a dependency on C libraries. And even now, it's still rare to see).

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#682

Post by randomdata »

yCombLinks wrote: post #215
izacus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's a winner, it's still named "Java".

I was talking in the context of the Ruby/ Python/ interpreted language world of the parent post

Frankly, I'm shocked it is not Javascript. It seems like it shows up everywhere.

Maybe it is because we consider Typescript to be a different language? The rise of Typescript has eroded into the use of Javascript proper quite a bit. Standing alone, I could see them being losers to Python overall. But at the same time Python 2 and Python 3 are different languages, yet seemed to be grouped together, so is there justification for Javascript and Typescript to be divided?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#683

Post by pwdisswordfishc »

gilcot wrote: post #462
BlueTemplar wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, why didn't the free alternatives to Matlab like Octave or Scilab win out then ?

I think people were not ready to switch from some heavy established software. Also by that time, costless was seen as less qualitative (certainly because organisations are happy with licences and are always looking for support contract ?) Coming later, when the market(?) is ready, made R more successful. I think people used to compare to established standard and detractors are always there to point out missing stuffs…

But R is itself a reimplementation of S.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#684

Post by hbrn »

bb88 wrote: post #571
germandiago wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who uses C++, I must say something that also applies, somewhat, to Java. We have all the cool kids like Kotlin, Rust, etc. However, when it is about finishing a project, beating C++ or Java ecosystems is almost impossible. Besides that, C++ has improved a lot over time. It still has its warts and knives but you can code very reasonable C++ with a few guidelines and there are also linters, and -Wall -Wextr…

> However, when it is about finishing a project, beating C++ or Java ecosystems is almost impossible. Yet, somehow people do this with python, perl, and ruby. Google hires professional python people too.

Not only do this, but do it way more successfully. I'll never get tired of repeating that among top YC startups, Java as a primary language contributes to roughly 1% of value, while Python + Ruby are almost at 70%.

https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#685

Post by lelanthran »

dmarchand90 wrote: post #204
dylan604 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

> 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 wasn't just "having a standard" that mattered; in Perl it was actively encouraged to find a different way of doing something.

"There is more than one way to do it" was often taken by the Perl programmer as a challenge to find all the other ways, and then use them all in different parts of the same program.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#686

Post by hbrn »

jacurtis wrote: post #268
Loeffelmann wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fe…

> 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.

This is true for any language. Arguably, what's different about Python is that the more senior the engineers you're interviewing, the more likely their solutions to converge.

Just because something is in the Zen of Python, doesn't mean it automatically gets followed by every Python engineer. It's Zen, after all - you don't automatically get enlightened just by reading it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#687

Post by lelanthran »

tootie wrote: post #349
AdamH12113 wrote: post #71

The way I (somewhat hazily) remember it, Python was mainly competing with Perl as a scripting language, not Ruby as an application/web language. I started hearing about Ruby years later when Ruby on Rails drove the Web 2.0 movement, but that feels like a different era to me. Eric S. Raymond wrote an article[1] in 2000 about his experience trying Python after spending a lot of time with Perl. I'll quote some of it her…

I think it's kinda nonsense. No programming language is intuitive. It's arcane by nature. Having slightly more concise syntax saves you maybe a week of learning time. I used to write Perl about as fast as I could think because I had a lot of practice with it. I mostly do Python now, but do a lot less coding in general and I have to google syntax constantly. Python is less noisy, but it's not really more intuitive for…

> I used to write Perl about as fast as I could think because I had a lot of practice with it. I mostly do Python now, but do a lot less coding in general and I have to google syntax constantly. Python is less noisy, but it's not really more intuitive for me.

Well, it isn't intuitive now. It was a lot better than Perl back in 2002 or so, when it really started taking off.

Now, a lot of serious Python code is simply incomprehensible.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#689

Post by mananaysiempre »

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.

> Python is not the best language for any particular task, but is nearly always the second best language for that task

Pointing out any problem where speed is the difference between working and unusable—e.g. ray tracing—is probably too cheap a shot, as it’s not like Ruby or Perl are any better in that regard, and LuaJIT came too late to be relevant to the current question.

One range of problems where I’ve found Python (unextended by a code generator) to be surprisingly awful, though, is everywhere the ML style of algebraic datatypes + pattern matching is natural: compilers, basically, all the way down to a regex engine. There’s just no comparison.

Maybe things have changed now that `match` exists? I’ve not yet had the time to try, even if the double indentation doesn’t make me hopeful.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#690

Post by dmarchand90 »

citizenpaul wrote: post #666
bigger_cheese wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main argument seems to be comments should left with the commit message and not "inline" i.e mixed with the code. Personally I make heavy use of inline style comments.

I've worked in tech my whole life and never heard a dev make these comments are bad claims. I only work in the boring world though. Is this a startup or FAANG or silicon valley thing?

In clean code there is a chapter about eliminating useless comments. I think this has some merits. Think of the following made up example:

sum = sum_two_numbers(number1, number2)

Probably doesn't need a comment.

The other argument is that comments need to be maintained and are subject to decay. E.g. the code they are commenting on changes.

The book goes into other examples but i think the idea isn't to eliminate comments but to be thoughtful and judicious in which you use

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