431–440 of 856 posts
In a world before good dependency and package management, being able to do most things using the standard library made things much easier!
Python ended up 'specializing' in data contexts, thanks to Numpy / Pandas, and as a result, ended up becoming the first exposure to programming than anyone doing data stuff had. That was millions of people. In that space, it had no competitors. Ruby ended up 'specializing' in web dev, because of Rails. But when Node and React came out, Ruby on Rails had to compete with Nodejs + React / MERN as a way of building a web…
I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first. After all, there was a reason people put so much effort into writing Numpy in the first place. I think a lot of people were attracted to the language design, as captured in the Zen of Python ( https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ ), such as: Explicit is better than implicit. Readability counts. Errors should never pass silently (unless explicitly silenced)…
There’s not even one obvious flavour of Python to use.
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+1 for mentioning that python's original competitor was Perl. This point is forgotten some 20-30 years latter
Not just perl, but C/C++/Java as well. Ruby was a competitor to Java JSP development back in the day. And I remember when a lot of Java people jumped ship to Ruby. I moved from C++ to python over a decade ago and never looked back. Back then, the python jobs were scarce -- but based upon how I picked up the language, many of the typical C++ issues just disappeared -- and I knew it was going to become popular. One com…
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I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first. After all, there was a reason people put so much effort into writing Numpy in the first place. I think a lot of people were attracted to the language design, as captured in the Zen of Python ( https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ ), such as: Explicit is better than implicit. Readability counts. Errors should never pass silently (unless explicitly silenced)…
Only one of the items in your "such as" list is unique to python's philosophy, and that is "there should be one way to do it". Ruby embraces the many ways to accomplish something, it's true. However, the three others are not unique to python. Ruby especially embraces "readability counts". And I can't think of anything in the ruby language itself that is implicit over explicit. Perhaps you are thinking of rails and co…
Far less true than with Perl.
In another hand, many questions I asked about Python came with various way to do the stuff. So I'm not sure about that advertisement.
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Numpy is certainly amazing, but there are tons of competitors in the data/scientific space, which pure "A-type" data scientists tend to prefer: R, SSPS, Matlab... The difference is that Python doesn't entirely suck as a general-purpose language. Sure, you might have better options, but it's still reasonable to write almost anything in Python. Other scripting languages like Ruby, JS and Lua are probably a little bit b…
Some industries are stuck on matlab (jet propulsion, for example) but in general people from sciences are either Python or R, and SAS/SPSS are only really used in places like health care or pharma where there's a lot of regulation in place, because the software is designed around that regulation, unlike Python and R.
- The common wisdom back then was that Python was attracting mostly C programmers who were looking for a faster way to write C and to interface with it, while Ruby was attracting mostly Java programmers who were tired of writing FactoryFactoryFactory classes. As a result, the Python community had a lot more C programmers who were able to work on the lower-level parts of Python (such as the VM and native libraries, like Numpy).
- The original Ruby interpreter (MRI) was very, very slow. It was replaced by YARV when Ruby 1.9 was released. YARV was a bytecode interpreter, while MRI, if I recall correctly, didn't even use bytecode. It just did the parsing while it was executing code. Before the switch to YARV, I remember regularly seeing Ruby at the bottom of the programming language benchmarks page, and it took something like 100x-150x longer than C for a task. Python was about 5x as fast as Ruby back then, IIRC.
- Aside from speed, the Ruby VM had a lot of other problems. The Python VM was rock-solid in comparison. See the links below for more info.
- The Ruby community back then had a reputation for being... unruly, let's say. Some characters there. It also suffered from that sort of chronic beginner syndrome that appears in isolated programming communities. I remember one guy in particular who was fond of justifying Ruby's weaknesses in odd ways. (For example, he said that Ruby doesn't need a debugger because it makes coding so easy that you'll never need one! In reality, Ruby didn't have a debugger because no one felt like making one.)
Here is a blog post talking about issues with the Ruby VM: https://web.archive.org/web/20100606205042/http://cbcg.net/2... (I never forgot that title, haha)
and the discussion on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kg8e/python_u...
> My impression is that in the ‘00s, Python and Ruby were both relatively new, dynamically typed, Your impression is wrong. Python goes back to 1988. It was known in FOSS circles in the 90's: a minority within a minority. The rise of the web exposed more programmers to FOSS, due to pretty much everyone in web eventually having to work with GNU/Linux servers. More developers than ever were suddenly exposed to cruft th…
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I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first. After all, there was a reason people put so much effort into writing Numpy in the first place. I think a lot of people were attracted to the language design, as captured in the Zen of Python ( https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ ), such as: Explicit is better than implicit. Readability counts. Errors should never pass silently (unless explicitly silenced)…
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. There’s not even one obvious flavour of Python to use.
The way I (somewhat hazily) remember it, Python was mainly competing with Perl as a scripting language, not Ruby as an application/web language. I started hearing about Ruby years later when Ruby on Rails drove the Web 2.0 movement, but that feels like a different era to me. Eric S. Raymond wrote an article[1] in 2000 about his experience trying Python after spending a lot of time with Perl. I'll quote some of it her…
This really jives with my experience. I learned Ruby first and used it as my scripting language of choice for years, but I constantly found myself having to lookup how to do even the most basic tasks.
A day or two after learning Python I was already as productive as I had been with Ruby, it was wild.
This isn't so much a jab at Ruby, just that Python worked the way I thought a programming language should, which made everything easy.