Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?

After all these years, I assume it must measure in the tens to hundreds of thousands?

It’s in those moments of consideration that I understand humanity hasn’t done a very good job grappling with its frailty and mortality. If we had, then we’d have a crowned a winner that didn’t subjugate us endlessly to the most vapid and Sisyphean aspects of programming. Python is a lesson in managing existential angst, which I now assume was the point of it from the very beginning.

Larry Wall, creator of Perl, coined the phrase, "make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible". But the things perl made easy were not always things that the market needed. Perl was very distrustful of enterprise disciplines and the perl culture "let a thousand flowers bloom" mentality (which they/we called "There's more than one way to do it"/(TMTOWTDI)) was not actually useful for organizations maintaining larger code bases/systems with large groups of mixed skill level people.

Python threaded that needle of centralizing a right way to do things (not just whitespaces) more effectively.

I also observed Scala suffering from similarly disfunctional "TMTOWTDI" dynamic in organizations I belonged to; different people had wildly different styles of solving even basic problems and it really made code hard to maintain even in smaller organizations where people came and went and new people were onboarded frequently.

Plus data science use cases saved Python's web/scripting lifespan in a way slightly analogous to AI/CUDA extending NVidia's 3D graphics-centric roots. (Although the python data science ecosystem nowdays does have some TMTOWTDI weaknesses that remind me of perl/cpan's choices of web development frameworks of the mid-2000s!)

Perl’s alien syntax and how there were multiple competing “best practices” put off newcomers and made it difficult to code review.

Perl also stagnated for quite some time due to the efforts to move to Perl 6, though python likewise stalled later it already had better traction at that point.

However I’d argue that Perl lost to PHP at least as much as it lost to python. PHP was revolutionary at the time for how easy and straightforward it was to do simple web programming which was one of the big use cases for Perl.

By the early 2010s there wasn't much of any use case that made sense to choose Perl. Sysadmin scripting was clearer to review and maintain in python and golang, web applications moved to php and frameworks written in languages that didn’t have the downsides of Perl.