Because its easy.
Because it has an interpreter.
Because it has notebooks.
Because it has huge set of libraries & easy library import.
Because schools are teaching it.
Because a lot of cloud native tools support it / prefer it.
Why Python keeps growing, explained
121–130 of 459 posts
Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Realistically something that takes 1 second in C++ will take 10 seconds (if you write efficient python and lean heavily on fast libraries) to 10 minutes in python. But the rest of your point stands
Damn! Is the rule of thumb really a 10x performance hit between Python/C++? I don’t doubt you’re correct, I’m just thinking of all the unnecessary cycles I put my poor CPU through.
Of course it depends on what you are doing, but 10x is a pretty good case. I recently re-wrote a C++ tool in python and even though all the data parsing and computing was done by python libraries that wrap high performance C libraries, the program was still 6 or 7 times slower than C++. Had I written the python version in pure python (no numpy, no third party C libraries) it would no doubt have been 1000x slower.
Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained
#123This 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…
The antigravity part is probably a reference to https://xkcd.com/353/
Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Explicit block markers are much easier to teach. The point of communication is to express something in a way that the listener understands it. Simply expressing something that is comfortable or normal to the speaker is simply not useful for either party of the goal is communication.
You're right. What matters is that explicit block markers are easier to learn (from the student's perspective). Being easier to teach (from the teacher's perspective) doesn't matter as much.
Sure, but without the white space defined blocks it is entirely on you to teach them about the importance of formatting their code to ensure readability.
Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained
#125Comparing 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…
This is just a property of having libraries. If you've got the same libraries in Java then the code looks identical except that you stick to word "var" in front of lines 4 and 6 and you don't have named arguments.
Python does have a great data processing ecosystem. But that isn't really a property of the language.
Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained
#126Python 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 some point, every engineer has heard this same argument but in favor of all kinds of dubious things such as emailing zip files of source code, not having tests, not having a build system, not doing IaC, not using the type system, etc.
I'm sure Rust was the wrong tool for the job in your case but I find this type of get shit done argument unpersuasive in general. It overestimates the value of short-term delivery and underestimates how quickly an investment in doing things "the right way" pays off.
Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained
#127The comparison with Java is always a funny one. Consider this: import sys def main( args: list[str], ) -> int: sys.stdout.write(“hi\n”) return 0 sys.exit(main()) Apart from the call to write instead of print everything else there is a standard Python pattern for writing testable, type-safe arg-parsing code! It’s just that you don’t have to write testable, type-safe code if you don’t want to.
A lot of Java's verbosity isn't so much from the language, but from when the code was written. It happened to come to popularity at a time when big over-engineered Gang of Four-style design was hot . So you get a lot of code written in this over-engineered fashion where half the classes have names that end in DelegateFactoryFacadeMessengerImpl. Some of it is the language too, but modern Java can definitely be reasona…
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Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn! Is the rule of thumb really a 10x performance hit between Python/C++? I don’t doubt you’re correct, I’m just thinking of all the unnecessary cycles I put my poor CPU through.
Well at least 10x, sometimes more. Not really surprising when you think about that it's a VM reading and parsing your code as a string at runtime.
> it's a VM reading and parsing your code as a string at runtime.
Commonly it creates the .pyc files, so it doesn't really re-parse your code as a string every time. But it does check the file's dates to make sure that the .pyc file is up to date.
On debian (and I guess most distributions) the .pyc files get created when you install the package, because generally they go in /usr and that's only writeable by root.
It does include the full parser in the runtime, but I'd expect most code to not be re-parsed entirely at every start.
The import thing is really slow anyway. People writing command lines have to defer imports to avoid huge startup times to load libraries that are perhaps needed just by some functions that might not even be used in that particular run.
Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Sure, but what's not really python per se.
But that's exactly the strength of Python: it's an interface language. It's meant to make pretty sophisticated things like CUDA easy for everyone.
Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained
#130It's interesting that people keep claiming that indentation-based blocks makes Python easier to learn and read. I've been teaching programming to students in banking, finance and insurance for a few years, using Python, and my experience with them is the opposite. They have been struggling with that a lot. They didn't pay too much attention to white spaces and tabs, probably because they are "invisible", and couldn't…
On the other hand, back in college I was a TA for an intro to programming course that used Java. This:
> They didn't pay too much attention to white spaces and tabs, probably because they are "invisible"
can get so much worse than people imagine, when the language doesn't enforce it. It was that experience that made me lean towards python being a good introductory language, to help people get used to correctly indenting code in general.