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Why Python keeps growing, explained

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Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#211

Post by rootusrootus »

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.

My most successful career epiphany was realizing that everyone -- my customers, my boss, etc -- was happier if I shipped code when I thought it was 80% ready. That long tail from 80-100% generates a lot of frustration.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#212

Post by xarope »

blensor wrote: post #173
CE02 wrote: post #169

One thing I’d add to this conversation, though I’m certain it’s already been stated: As many have mentioned, there is a large subset of the user base that uses Python for applied purposes in unrelated fields that couldn’t care less about more granular aspects of optimization. I work as a research assistant for international finance faculty and I would say that compared to the average Hackernews reader, I’m technologi…

I hate to admit that I very often start the python repl to just do some simple calculations. I always have multiple terminals open so instead of opening a calculator I just use python in one of the terminals.

yup, from decimal import Decimal, and get better accuracy than any default calculator

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#213

Post by canadianfella »

blensor wrote: post #173
CE02 wrote: post #169

One thing I’d add to this conversation, though I’m certain it’s already been stated: As many have mentioned, there is a large subset of the user base that uses Python for applied purposes in unrelated fields that couldn’t care less about more granular aspects of optimization. I work as a research assistant for international finance faculty and I would say that compared to the average Hackernews reader, I’m technologi…

I hate to admit that I very often start the python repl to just do some simple calculations. I always have multiple terminals open so instead of opening a calculator I just use python in one of the terminals.

[dead]

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#214

Post by Yoric »

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 fully agree with the description.

What worries me, though, is that the features that make Python quite good at prototyping make it rather bad at auditing for safety and security. And we live in a world in which production code is prototyping code, which means that Python code that should have remained a quick experiment – and more often than not, written by people who are not that good at Python or don't care about code quality – ends up powering safety/security-critical infrastructures. Cue in the thousands of developer-hours debugging or attempting to scale code that is hostile to the task.

I would claim that the same applies to JavaScript/Node, btw.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#215

Post by bluedino »

revskill wrote: post #155
steveBK123 wrote: post #121

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.

No, because academics or professors don't care about real software enginneering and best practices.

Try dealing with your corporate security team, who's detecting out of date Python versions.

For the most part these update without much hassle, but now you've "broken" your researcher's code. It takes them a while to fix this, and then the security guys find out that Python packages also need updated...

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#216

Post by codethief »

kaba0 wrote: post #179
sva_ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what you're doing, but I don't think it is generally accurate. What slows Python down is generally the "everything is an object" attitude of the interpreter. I.e. you call a function, the interpreter has to first create an object of the thing you're calling. In C++, due to zero-cost abstractions, this usually just boils down to a CALL instruction preceded by a bunch of PUSH instructions in assemb…

> What slows Python down is generally the "everything is an object" attitude of the interpreter Nah, it’s the interpreter itself. Due to it not having JIT compilation there is a very high ceiling it can not even in theory surpass (as opposed to things like pypy, or graal python).

I don't think this is true: Other Python runtimes and compilers (e.g. Nuitka) won't magically speed up your code to the level of C++.

Python is primarily slowed down because of the fact that each attribute and method access results in multiple CALL instructions since it's dictionaries and magic methods all the way down.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#217

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

blippage wrote: post #77

My go-to language is C++, although I know and have admired Python for a long time. I had a BMP file which I wanted to transpose and turn into raw RGB 5-8-5 values. Using the Python Image Library made things absurdly easy. That's Python's advantage in a nutshell. Things are just so absurdly easy.

Sure, but that's because there was a good library available, little to do with Python vs C++.

If there was an equally good C++ image library available then it would have been equally simple in C++.

Of course the thing is that, in general, there may well NOT have been such a C++ library, and this is what makes languages such as Java and Python popular - because of the breadth of libraries available.

For C++ image manipulation I've found libvips to be decent, but the point still stands that for a given problem there may not be decent libraries available.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#218

Post by ur-whale »

Python is really nice.

Easy to learn yet powerful. Easy to read yet very concise. Anytime you need something complicated, it's a pip and an import away.

Couple of downsides though: - slow - does not handle multiprocessing nicely.

If the python team ever manages to fixes these two (not easy or it would have happened a while ago) to bring it to - say - the level of Go, Python would be the absolute killer language.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#219

Post by Yoric »

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.

That is interesting. I went in the other direction :)

I am tired of having to refactor shiny new things churned out at 10x the speed and that keep breaking in production. These days, if given a choice, I prefer writing them in Rust code, spending more time writing and less time refactoring everything as soon as it breaks or needs to scale.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#220

Post by awkward »

Yoric wrote: post #214
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 fully agree with the description. What worries me, though, is that the features that make Python quite good at prototyping make it rather bad at auditing for safety and security. And we live in a world in which production code is prototyping code, which means that Python code that should have remained a quick experiment – and more often than not, written by people who are not that good at Python or don't care about…

We still live in a world where many outward facing networked applications are written in C. Dynamic languages with safe strings are far from the floor for securable tools.
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