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Python has much better support for data anlysis/machine learning, but, honestly, I don't hear about django or other python web frameworks anywhere as much as I hear about rails. Have you got a source for your first point?
As a counterpoint: I never hear about rails being used for anything, except maybe GitHub. I personally also don't know a single person that knows how to write code in Ruby. We both might live in a bubble.
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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…
The book is written for Python 1.5, but win32 hasn't changed much and neither has the core Python syntax, so it's still very much applicable. (The one major difference is that the book had to concern ifself with converting Unicode strings everywhere, whereas in Python 3 with current pywin32 it just works.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Win32-Windows-Prog...
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?
* The outstanding documentation site.
* Execution speed for an interpreted language.
* Highly transparent language evolution, managed by the nonprofit Python Foundation.
* Semantic versioning.
* Core developer communication is in English.
* Excellent module definition and import system.
* Culture of explicitness, not implicitness.
The ecosystem has a few huge weaknesses (e.g. packaging and dependency management) which put me off for the most part. But the strengths seem to be overwhelming enough to put Python on a success trajectory.
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,…
In quant finance space, Python has been gradually taking over matlab/sas for signal/model implementation.
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To push back on a few of these: Lambdas are best replaced with `def` in Python - you can define a function anywhere and naming it has advantages. It's a tiny bit more verbose, but in any situation the "crippled" lambda isn't enough, it would probably be less clear in a single expression anyway. I get the arguments that it's less expressive this way, but honestly, it's one of those cases where I think it generally inc…
Alternately, `x and y or z`
After a 6 month foray into Ruby/Rails, was just going to hop back into learning Spring Boot today, brush up on Java 8 skills and the like. Great to see Java is still #1 Hah!
What's making you leave the Ruby ecosystem?
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PyPy isn’t compatible with several things I (try to) use, namely TensorFlow. That’s another thing on the list - I don’t like needing multiple versions of the interpreter installed.
Lots of things don't have language bindings with Tensorflow...Lisp, Ruby, JS.
... Because I hate Python, haha. Anyways, for the most part, I have to suck it up and just use Python.