Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2018

jetbrains.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 62 posts

Re: The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2018

#24

Post by poulsbohemian »

Someone1234 wrote: post #2

What's suddenly making Python so popular? I mean, it has been around since the 90s, why is it suddenly gaining tracking in 2017-18? What changed?

FWIW: For the first ten years of my career, I primarily developed using Java. By about 2008 or so I was tired of looking at SomeAbstractFactoryVistorSingleton messes. I got into a project where I had green-field opportunity to try something different and Python just felt like a breath of fresh air. A few years went by and I gave node.js a try, thinking that Javascript would inevitably win out on the server side as well. Didn't take long to go back to Python - its stable, mature, performant, and syntactically simple. It does what I need it to for now.

Re: The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2018

#25

Post by thosakwe »

ttsda wrote: post #20
thosakwe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning/data science, definitely. I'm personally not a big fan of Python at all (actually I hate it), but one can't deny its overwhelming dominance in those spaces. I feel that it's only just starting to grow, and will continue to get bigger.

you hate it? care to elaborate?

Yes, hate. It boils down to my personal preference, though, so take it with less than a grain of salt.

The MAIN things that bother me: * Slowness * Enforced rules on whitespace * Incompatibility between 2.7 and 3.x * The fact that many tools still use 2.7, making something virtualenv necessary at all * Needing both pip and conda (i.e. to try Caffe) * Extreme dynamic typing means code completions are often poor or of little help * Windows support often lacking

There's actually a _lot_ more, but for the sake of not hijacking this thread, I'm going to stop my list there.

Anyways, those are just my personal preferences; I don't expect those to be reasons for other people to not like Python.

Re: The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2018

#27

Post by abledon »

Someone1234 wrote: post #2

What's suddenly making Python so popular? I mean, it has been around since the 90s, why is it suddenly gaining tracking in 2017-18? What changed?

Look at the SentDex Python Programming Youtube channel.

The amount of crazy stuff he teaches with python is amazing. No other language can promise that calibre of idea expressing power coupled with ease of development.

Re: The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2018

#28

Post by abledon »

soneca wrote: post #5
Someone1234 wrote: post #2

What's suddenly making Python so popular? I mean, it has been around since the 90s, why is it suddenly gaining tracking in 2017-18? What changed?

Python mostly replaced Ruby(Rails) as the first choice for beginners learning backend for the web. And Python is becoming the first choice for the Machine Learning and even Data Science.

Where is your data on RoR being replaced by Python Seneca? Is it Anecdotal or? I am Actually curious.

Re: The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2018

#29

Post by kjeetgill »

Someone1234 wrote: post #2

What's suddenly making Python so popular? I mean, it has been around since the 90s, why is it suddenly gaining tracking in 2017-18? What changed?

I wouldn't call it sudden at all. Python is great for the reason Java is great: diverse robust ecosystem for a ton of different fields. It's about ubiquity.

It's installed on virtually everything already. It's one of the easiest languages to learn (the basics), and is used as a teaching language. Even outside of CS everyone knows it.

Used in web programming (Django, Flask, etc.), numerical computing (Jupyter, numpy, scipy, pandas), AI/ML (TensorFlow, scikit-learn), bioinformatics, easy bindings to EVERYTHING (openCV, bullet physics, kafka, zookeeper, protobuf, json, xml).

It's usually concise enough, mostly straightforward to read, reasonably structured (though big codebases can become a pain). In most companies you see python used in tooling ALL THE TIME. It's fantastic for ducktape programming; often 'promoting' a largeish bash script to python. It ate perl's place there before.

I've even seen ipython work well as a login shell. Jeezz.

Sure the 2.7 -> 3 thing was a ton of drama, the package manager situation changes ever few years, but hey: a lesser language and ecosystem would have fallen apart under it.

Disclaimer: I'm a Java+Python fan boy in all their incarnations.

Post reply on HN