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I would say Python's killer app is its massive library -- the size and quality has few rivals. No doubt Python's readability and approachability contributed to this.
If you mean its built-in standard library - in some cases, it's just a place for code to rot and stagnate. Ubiquity comes at the cost of massive friction to update.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you mean its built-in standard library - in some cases, it's just a place for code to rot and stagnate. Ubiquity comes at the cost of massive friction to update.
I'm not referring to just the standard library. I'm referring to all the libraries in the ecosystem.
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Yes Chas, you're definitely no stranger in the Clojure community :) (I watched your O'reilly webcast btw). I'm not saying that Clojure should address a narrow problem but if we look back at the history of Java, it offers a few "real" improvement over C++ such as garbage collection, nice standard library, and the promise of WORA (albeit lots of hiccups here and there). By real I mean something that people can see and…
(If you watched the O'Reilly live webcast, then give this a try: http://cemerick.com/2012/05/02/starting-clojure/ ) Riffing on what technomancy said nearby, a lot of the issues that Clojure addresses are so taken for granted in most of the broader software development world, that it can be challenging to wrap up its benefits into a tasty, easily digestable nugget comparable to "Java gets rid of malloc and pointers" (…
Unnecessary (if slight) nastiness directed towards (developers choosing) Scala. Unworthy of you (imo). There are significant differences between Scala and Clojure (other than {} vs ()) and trivializing a valid choice of one over another by ascribing it to fear of parantheses (or whatever) isn't a particularly compelling argument.
I've never really noticed Scala devs (leave alone book authors!) throwing darts at Clojure, but have seen the reverse (and at Haskell, on the Clojure mailing list but Rich Hickey shut that down hard and fast, good for him). Sad, and unnecessary (imo).
Scala and Clojure are both awesome and (totally imo) evangelizers of both languages should realize we are all on the same side (again totally imo, feel free to ignore).
Yes there are trolls in all language communities, but I think the expectations about the top developers in each community are (and should be) much higher.
Otherwise, solid comment. And hey, your book is awesome.