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Why Python keeps growing, explained

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Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#291

Post by JohnFen »

I just wish that I enjoyed using it. I've been doing a fair amount of Python work over the years because it's been required by my employers, but to be honest, I kind of hate it.

I think the thing I hate the most about it is that white space is significant. It's like we travelled back in time to the early days, and picked up one the bad things about them and brought it back. I find that makes it more difficult for me to read, and more difficult for me to write (from a mechanical type-in-the-code point of view).

I have other niggling issues with it, but if the white space thing weren't an issue, I doubt the other issues would bother me enough to complain about them.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#292

Post by wongarsu »

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…

A popular opinion in game development is that you should write a prototype first to figure out what works and is fun, and once you reach a good solution throw away that prototype code and write a proper solution with the insigts gained. The challenge is that many projects just extend the prototype code to make the final product, and end up with a mess.

Regular sofware development is a lot like that as well. But you can kind of get around that by having Python as the "prototyping language", and anything that's proven to be useful gets converted to a language that's more useful for production.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#293

Post by jezzamon »

dkarl wrote: post #270
Yoric wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I sometimes think about what Python would be like if it were written today, with the hindsight of the last thirty years. Immutability would be the default, but mutability would be allowed, marked in some concise way so that it was easy to calculate things using imperative-style loops. Pervasive use of immutable instances would make it impossible for libraries to rely on mutating objects a la SQLAlchemy. The language…

I think free mutability and not really needing to know about types are two things that make the language easier for beginners.

If someone who's not familiar with programming runs into an error like "why can't I change the value of X" that might take them multiple hours to figure out, or they may never figure it out. Even if the error message is clear, total beginners often just don't know how to read them and use them.

They provide longer term advantages once your program becomes larger but the short term advantages are more important as a scripting language imo

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#294

Post by pbourke »

UncleMeat wrote: post #125
teekert wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Creating a new venv, installing a few needed libraries that you know the names of with a simple command and writing a quick low-ceremony script that uses those libraries is frictionless in Python. Doing that repeatedly in nearly every other major language is not as easy.

Some languages have a good integrated tool chain (Rust, Go) but are not as approachable and forgiving.

Some are approachable but lack the friction-free story for locating and installing 3rd party dependencies.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#295

Post by rootusrootus »

osigurdson wrote: post #244
rootusrootus wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you clarify this comment?

You mean the bit about frustration?

It's just an application of the Pareto principle. That last 20% of work to make perfect software costs a lot of time. Customers (and by extension, management) do not care how pretty your code is, how perfect your test coverage is (unless your manager is a former developer, then they might have more of an opinion), they care most that you ship it. Bugs are a minor irritation compared to sitting around waiting for functionality they need, as long as you're responsive in fixing the bugs that do come up.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#296

Post by gary_0 »

jherskovic wrote: post #123
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…

The antigravity part is probably a reference to https://xkcd.com/353/

> Hello world is just `print "Hello, world!"`

SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print("Hello, world!")?

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#297

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

kittiepryde wrote: post #225
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is super interesting because it suggests Python has evolved in a direction opposite to the Python Paradox - http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html Whereas before you could get smarter programmers using Python, now because of the exponential growth of Python, the median Python programmer is likely someone with little or no software engineering or computer architecture background who is basically just gluing…

Neat observation. I wasn't doing much programming in 2004, but, I'm guessing 2004 Python would be like today's Rust. People learn it because they love it.

I think more so Rust than even Python on 2004 since Rust has a pretty steep learning curve and does require a non-trivial amount of dedication to learning it.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#298

Post by giantrobot »

dagw wrote: post #65
xaitv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the argument that at a certain scale the time of a developer is simply more expensive than time on a server. If I write something in C++ that does a task in 1 second and it takes me 2 days to write, and I write the same thing in Python that takes 2 seconds but I can write it in 1 day, the 1 day of extra dev time might just pay for throwing a more high performance server against it and calling it a day. A…

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

I spend most of my time waiting on IO, something like C++ isn't going to improve my performance much. If C++ takes 1ms to transform data and my Python code takes 10ms, it's not much of a win for me when I'm waiting 100ms for IO.

With Python I can write and test on a Mac or Windows and easily deploy on Linux. I can iterate quickly and if I really need "performance" I can throw bigger or more VPSes at the problem with little extra cognitive load.

I do not have anywhere near the same flexibility and low cognitive load with C++. The better performance is nice but for almost everything I do day to day completely unnecessary and not worth the effort. My case isn't all cases, C++ (or whatever compiled language you pick) will be a win for some people but not for me.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#299

Post by sethrin »

artagnon wrote: post #87
qsort wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Python all the time both for my personal stuff and for some side-projects at work, so this isn't a dunk on Python, but honestly it feels like a circular thing: it's popular because it's popular. I wouldn't say it's friendlier than the alternatives, Perl and Shell scripts sure, but not when compared to Javascript, Ruby or Lua. Now, if you're talking about libraries, support, etc. then sure, Python wins hands dow…

I think Lua was always seen as a bit obscure, and not enough people invested in the language to write useful utilities. It has a solid C foreign function interface, and the compiler is quite fast, which leaves me puzzled about why it never gained traction. I think it's an embedded scripting language in the majority of use cases (e.g. NeoVim, LuaLaTeX, scripting in some game engines). The story of Ruby is altogether d…

> The story of Ruby is altogether different: they made the fatal mistake of not defining a C foreign function interface in the standard, otherwise I imagine we'd be seeing numerical computation and ML libraries with a Ruby interface today.

This to me is extremely plausible, and sad.

Re: Why Python keeps growing, explained

#300

Post by csunbird »

noirscape wrote: post #85
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…

Python's biggest advantages are in my experience: 1. Near zero boilerplate. Python's boilerplate is usually no more than setting up a class and then calling a method. Often you can skip the class and just call it directly. This is probably the biggest strength; to give you an example, my standard test for a languages approachability is "how much work do I need to put in to get a very simple JSON file from a web URL"…

Java programmer, recently switched to using Python in the job - This exactly is it. Sane defaults is the killer feature of Python.
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