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The Incredible Growth of Python

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Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#3
TL;DR: Slightly interesting but narrowly focused article with clickbait-ish headline. It charts the growth of Stack Overflow python question views in the last five years. While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. And no hypothesis is given for the growth in question views, although they tease a future post about that. It would have been far more interesting if they correlated their stats to lines of code in github or something along those lines.

To me, if anything I'm curious why python was so low percentage-wise in question views only five years ago. Anecdotally it doesn't seem to me that python usage in "industry" has grown that dramatically in the last five years, but there could be other factors involved such as education. Or my biased gut instinct could be completely off.

(Note: been a python user for 20+ years.)

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#4
post #3

TL;DR: Slightly interesting but narrowly focused article with clickbait-ish headline. It charts the growth of Stack Overflow python question views in the last five years. While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. And no hypothesis is given for the growth in question views, although they tease a future post about that. It would have been far mor…

> To me, if anything I'm curious why python was so low percentage-wise in question views only five years ago.

The majority of the top CS colleges switched to teaching using Python within the last five years. This provides a big reason for companies to use Python as well, since it drives down the cost of hiring.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#5
post #4
post #3

TL;DR: Slightly interesting but narrowly focused article with clickbait-ish headline. It charts the growth of Stack Overflow python question views in the last five years. While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. And no hypothesis is given for the growth in question views, although they tease a future post about that. It would have been far mor…

> To me, if anything I'm curious why python was so low percentage-wise in question views only five years ago. The majority of the top CS colleges switched to teaching using Python within the last five years. This provides a big reason for companies to use Python as well, since it drives down the cost of hiring.

Same in France, it's the default language now.

It also mean more questions in SO by a lot of lost students.

And it means later, more Python devs on the market.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#6
Python 2 advocates were quite firm in telling us that Python 3 and its incompatibility with Python 2 had killed Python and people would abandon Python altogether in droves for other languages.

This post is suggesting the opposite, that Python is more healthy than ever and growing incredibly fast.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#7
post #3

TL;DR: Slightly interesting but narrowly focused article with clickbait-ish headline. It charts the growth of Stack Overflow python question views in the last five years. While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. And no hypothesis is given for the growth in question views, although they tease a future post about that. It would have been far mor…

I think even though Python in the industry like in web isn't growing as much as say Node, in other places like Data Science and Intro to programming in Unis and Schools Python is growing very fast.

The article is not narrow minded but has a narrow focus and only analyses concrete data from a single source. It may be globally accurate but indicates a rising trend in people being interested in python. While Python usage cannot be directly correlatd to SO, we can infer that languages that have more questions have more people using or learning it generally. In the same way languages with a small community of users don't always prefer SO but something more personal like Mailing lists or IRC (eg. J language).

It should be safe to conclude that due to Data Science being the new buzz word and python at the forefront of it all, atleast python is getting a lot of attention even if it doesn't translate directly to more users right away.

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#8
I'm surprised by the decline of C#. I thought it was better off than java these days. Also PHP is gliding down. They improved the language a lot, but I can't say I will miss the PHP world much.

About python, isn't it related to numpy mostly ?

Re: The Incredible Growth of Python

#9

Python 2 advocates were quite firm in telling us that Python 3 and its incompatibility with Python 2 had killed Python and people would abandon Python altogether in droves for other languages. This post is suggesting the opposite, that Python is more healthy than ever and growing incredibly fast.

Three of us (including me), in an academic lab, are making the jump from matlab to python. We use py3 (of Anaconda, on Windows10).

We like it, but we are constantly screaming and bitching about the complications of 23 ("Ahhh X and Y module only works on py2!", "Ahhh device developer only provides example code for Labview and Matlab!", "Ahhh python isn't even supported for this device/application!").

Package management ("Do I use conda? pip? easy_install? compile?") is annoying, I hope that something like hatch (https://github.com/ofek/hatch) maybe takes over everything -- because I think the mess that is package management is THE biggest deterrent for newcomers.

I think the one thing we are all learning from this experience is: JUST USE UBUNTU, doing python with Windows is a headache.

All of that said -- python is nice, it's amazing, it's the newer, funner Java. It is incredibly approachable, it can do pretty much EVERYTHING because of the expansive availability of libraries, it's finally a programming language that is great to get my 7 year old niece started on.

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