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Why Python keeps growing, explained

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Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#111

Post by onphonenow »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #81

I think one reason for Python growing popularity is because it's become the default tool in some domains whether it is the best tool or not. This week our Director ordered a total rewrite of two years of work in Python. His rationale: it's what everyone else uses in this space. No reason specific to our use case, just simply to follow the herd. I realise that a large community translates into easy hiring and rich eco…

What are you rewriting from? At director level focus is usually more on things like how easy is it to staff / get support for something. Python is strong here - you can find programmers globally who can do pretty well with it.

Can you say the same about your solution?

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#112

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

amelius wrote: post #66
pletnes wrote: post #11

Python keeps growing in number of users because it’s easy to get started, has libraries to load basically any data, and to perform any task. It’s frequently the second best language but it’s the second best language for anything. By the time a python programmer has «graduated» to learning a second language, exponential growth has created a bunch of new python programmers, most of which don’t consider themselves progr…

There are also programmers who are tired of chasing pointers and simply want to get stuff done. E.g. people who once wrote "robust" code in Rust but were "outcompeted" left and right by coworkers who churn out shiny new things at 10x the speed.

> at 10x the speed

Is a coping canard invented by programmers who can't into more powerful programming languages.

By far the slowest language for developing is PHP, it's even worse than plain C in that regard.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#113

Post by moffkalast »

loudmax wrote: post #108
moffkalast wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s the second best language for anything Anything that doesn't require high performance that is. Is there any 3D game engine for python yet? I guess Godot has gdscript which is 90% python by syntax, but that doesn't quite count I think.

You won't get high performance out of Python directly, but there are a lot of Python libraries that use C or a powerful low level language underneath. The heavy lifting in so much of machine learning is CUDA, but most people involved in ML are writing Python.

Sure, but what's not really python per se. One could also call C++ libraries from java via JNI and pretend java is super fast.

If people write program logic in python it will run at python speeds. Otherwise you're not really writing python, like nobody says some linux native program is bash because it happens to be launched from a bash script.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#114

Post by DeathArrow »

teekert wrote: post #37
pharmakom wrote: post #6

Comparing Python to Java 8 and saying it’s more readable isn’t showing much. And it’s not very portable the second dependencies with native code (which is common since pure Python is too inefficient for many tasks) are used. I think Python is popular for two reasons: - it’s believed to be beginner friendly compared to other languages. I’m not really sure why - maybe the whitespace? - it has an enormous set of librari…

I started in Python, as a Biologist (hooray for Jupyter-lab, coding so visually, in small steps, with output just there is so great when starting to learn Python). I ventured into other languages every now and then. For example I tried to make an Android app in Kotlin that gets info from some API. I expect something like this but with more brackets everywhere: import request data = request.get(https://some.api/get_so…

Your examples don't depend on the language but on the libraries. You can be as simple and concise in most languages, provided the libraries let you, instead of needing to add boiler plate.

But what if your web request fails? Do you deal with it in time or use some_value_I_want which might contain junk?

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#115

Post by raincole »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #81

I think one reason for Python growing popularity is because it's become the default tool in some domains whether it is the best tool or not. This week our Director ordered a total rewrite of two years of work in Python. His rationale: it's what everyone else uses in this space. No reason specific to our use case, just simply to follow the herd. I realise that a large community translates into easy hiring and rich eco…

> This week our Director ordered a total rewrite of two years of work in Python

WTF? Unless your system is originally written in a proprietary language that literally no one outside your company knows, I'll say it's a good sign that you need to change team (or change job). Don't work under a director like that.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#116

Post by benrutter »

pletnes wrote: post #11

Python keeps growing in number of users because it’s easy to get started, has libraries to load basically any data, and to perform any task. It’s frequently the second best language but it’s the second best language for anything. By the time a python programmer has «graduated» to learning a second language, exponential growth has created a bunch of new python programmers, most of which don’t consider themselves progr…

I completely agree - but you say that like it's a bad thing. I work as a developer alongside data scientists, who might have strong knowledge of statistics or machine learning frameworks rather than traditional programming chops.

For the most part they don't need to know about concurrency, memory efficiency etc, because they're using a library where those issues have been abstracted away.

I think that's what makes python ideal - it's interoperability with other languages and library ecosystem means less technical people can produce good, efficient work without having to take on a whole bunch of the footguns that would come from working directly in a language like c++ or Rust.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#117

Post by Jevon23 »

milliams wrote: post #109

This was already posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35000415 , I don't know why it didn't detect the duplicate. I'll repost my comment from there: This is a strange article. It's got the talking point about Python that we were hearing about 10 years ago - "tired of those pesky curly brackets in Java, try this new language you might not have heard of: Python!". Who reading the GitHub blog has not heard of…

>It's got the talking point about Python that we were hearing about 10 years ago - "tired of those pesky curly brackets in Java, try this new language you might not have heard of: Python!"

That was a talking point closer to 20 years ago, at this point.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#118

Post by milliams »

Jevon23 wrote: post #117
milliams wrote: post #109

This was already posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35000415 , I don't know why it didn't detect the duplicate. I'll repost my comment from there: This is a strange article. It's got the talking point about Python that we were hearing about 10 years ago - "tired of those pesky curly brackets in Java, try this new language you might not have heard of: Python!". Who reading the GitHub blog has not heard of…

>It's got the talking point about Python that we were hearing about 10 years ago - "tired of those pesky curly brackets in Java, try this new language you might not have heard of: Python!" That was a talking point closer to 20 years ago, at this point.

You're right, I think I was caught out by the unending march of time :)

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#119

Post by Zingler »

pletnes wrote: post #11

Python keeps growing in number of users because it’s easy to get started, has libraries to load basically any data, and to perform any task. It’s frequently the second best language but it’s the second best language for anything. By the time a python programmer has «graduated» to learning a second language, exponential growth has created a bunch of new python programmers, most of which don’t consider themselves progr…

> It’s frequently the second best language but it’s the second best language for anything.

This myth wasn't even true many years ago, it certainly isn't true today. You can build a mobile app, game, distributed systems, OS, GUI, Web frontend, "realtime" systems, etc in Python, but it is a weak choice for most of those things (and many others) let alone the second best option.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#120

Post by Izkata »

pharmakom wrote: post #21
Akronymus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - it’s believed to be beginner friendly compared to other languages. I’m not really sure why - maybe the whitespace? I am leaning more towards it looking like pseudocode > - it has an enormous set of libraries available to use I believe that to be the actual reason. I've long held that python is a kinda bad language, but with FANTASTIC libraries

beginner programmers don't know pseudo code either though! the best teaching language (imo) is one with few features or surprises. I think Scheme might come out top here.

> beginner programmers don't know pseudo code either though!

It looks like English. That's all pseudocode is, and they know that well enough.

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