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Ask HN: Why did Python win?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#611

Post by month13 »

treis wrote: post #332
dmazzoni wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

I think this is it. Love Ruby as a language. Have grown to hate the way Ruby developers write stuff. Stuff ends up with so much abstraction and indirection. End up yearning for a simpler time when you could write code that just did what you needed it to.

Delving into a gem sometimes makes me lose faith in ever using dependencies again.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#612

Post by rolandog »

Stranger43 wrote: post #467
mdbauman wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I decided it was time to add a scripting language, Perl and Python seemed like the obvious choices, and in my mind were equally good options. I asked my best friend which I should choose, and he more or less said, "You can't go wrong with either one, but when you ask for help Perl people are assholes and Python people are nice." I can't confirm his thoughts on Perl and I haven't interacted much with Ruby, b…

yep the Perl community kind of had issues around the turn of the millennium and the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end. I don't think there was any toxicity in the Ruby community but it was made up of working programmers where as the big leading voices in the python community was teaching assistants and students so it might have been more tailored to newbies. I don't recall th…

> [...] the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end.

Not GP, but the Python 2 vs 3 holy wars were also something that kept me from adopting Python as a scripting language a couple of years.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#613

Post by truculent »

mdbauman wrote: post #404
rout39574 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I imagine you have that perspective because you started less than 20 years ago. In some ways the idea of the Pythonic Way to do things evolved in opposition to Perl's vigorous advocacy of More Than One Way. Python has been really winning for some time, so it's natural that its ideological discipline has grown ragged. The crop of kids who value options above consistency don't have the scars of the Perl age to infor…

Back when I decided it was time to add a scripting language, Perl and Python seemed like the obvious choices, and in my mind were equally good options. I asked my best friend which I should choose, and he more or less said, "You can't go wrong with either one, but when you ask for help Perl people are assholes and Python people are nice." I can't confirm his thoughts on Perl and I haven't interacted much with Ruby, b…

That’s funny because that’s one of the reasons I tend to point beginners to R instead of Python for data work.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#614

Post by fuzztester »

germandiago wrote: post #523
bluGill wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ and Python are not competitors. Sure both are Turing complete so you can implement anything in either. However if you should is a different question. Python is very difficult to maintain when you program goes over 100k lines of code, while the static type system of c++ is good for millions. C++ compiles to fast binary code, while Python is typically 60x slower for logic (though often Python calls a fast algorithm…

As a person who uses C++, I must say something that also applies, somewhat, to Java. We have all the cool kids like Kotlin, Rust, etc. However, when it is about finishing a project, beating C++ or Java ecosystems is almost impossible. Besides that, C++ has improved a lot over time. It still has its warts and knives but you can code very reasonable C++ with a few guidelines and there are also linters, and -Wall -Wextr…

Hylo page says it was formerly Val.

IIRC, Val has been mentioned on HN sometimes earlier.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#615

Post by Illotus »

Stranger43 wrote: post #478
vonwoodson wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for mentioning that python's original competitor was Perl. This point is forgotten some 20-30 years latter

And were of cause forgetting VisualBasic because who cares about microsoftland those days but back when python/ruby emerged even windows server and IIS was relevant as this was kind of the peak of microsoft's dominance.

Yes, it is pretty weird to think that VB.Net flavor was fairly used in web dev even as late as 2006.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#616

Post by kuchenbecker »

jacurtis wrote: post #287
alerighi wrote: post #264

To me Ruby syntax looks too magic. Python is much more simple to understand, a person that doens't know python but another language such as C or Java can write programs in like 10 minutes. The only "strange" thing is the use of indentation for dividing blocks, but it's something you easily learn in 2 minutes. Another thing that helped python is the fact that you can do fairly low-level operations in a very high level…

I always used the word "magic" to describe Ruby syntax. It was my biggest complaint with it too. RoR took that even further by adding even more magic through a framework, where simple functions did HUGE amounts of hidden work. I will say, my favorite feature of Ruby was the question mark in methods convention. For those that don't know, a common convention in Ruby was to put a question mark at the end of any method t…

It's the "just works" part of magic that's the gotcha. I lead a team with a multi EiB Hadoop cluster and magically list status and rename dir can only be done with more and more caveats as you scale.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#617

Post by fjkdlsjflkds »

kstrauser wrote: post #206
deadmutex wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matlab costs $$. Matlab was ahead in perf for a long time, not sure now. E.g. they used to JIT code, etc. Comparing python to R, python feels like a much more mature language. R always seemed only useful for small scale projects, e.g. writing some script to process data with < 20 lines of code. Python codebases just scale much better.

It also has the nice feature of being good at multiple things. If you get a model running in Python, and decide you want to be able to run the code via an API, put it behind Flask and ta-da!, now it's a network service. It's not the best way to write analysis code, and it's not the best way to write a web service, but it's probably the best way to write analysis code that runs on a web service. I picked web services…

> If you get a model running in Python, and decide you want to be able to run the code via an API, put it behind Flask and ta-da!, now it's a network service.

You could say the same about a model (or any function) running in R. Want to instantly convert it to a web service? Use plumbr or RestRserve packages for that. Want to make a quick web application around it? Use the shiny package for that.

Just because Python is good at X, doesn't mean other languages are necessarily worse at it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#618

Post by bb88 »

rolandog wrote: post #612
Stranger43 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep the Perl community kind of had issues around the turn of the millennium and the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end. I don't think there was any toxicity in the Ruby community but it was made up of working programmers where as the big leading voices in the python community was teaching assistants and students so it might have been more tailored to newbies. I don't recall th…

> [...] the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end. Not GP, but the Python 2 vs 3 holy wars were also something that kept me from adopting Python as a scripting language a couple of years.

Yeah, python 2->3 transition was painful. But, I would argue that was self inflicted. Guido and company chose not to develop a 2.8/2.9/etc series where people could move their code base over incrementally.

I mean, I love python, but that sucked!

Yes it would have been more work for the devs, but the amount of work it meant for the users were worse.

In fact they pretty much just threw away anything before python 3.6 anyway now. Many things introduced in the 3.x series before 3.6 just don't work anymore (asyncio syntax being the notable one).

Re: Ask HN: Why did Python win?

#619

Post by arp242 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #266
arp242 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ruby also was more or less a Japanese-only thing until around 2000 And after that it still took quite a few years until "English support" really became first-class and comparable to Python. I looked at Ruby around 2002-2003 or so (I was looking at many different languages back then, pretty much anything I could get my hands on), and lots of Ruby stuff was in Japanese or poor English. That's all fine, but I specific…

Ruby’s English documentation remains terrible, unfortunately.

I can't say I've had much trouble with it; I have generally found it more than adequate.
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