Someday we will all program in Python

The only reason to write in a language like C or Java today (over Python) is speed. And there are a very limited number of applications that require that sort of speed. There's no question that Linux should be written in a low level language, or a high-performance chess bot. But I'm incredulous when I see anyone write a website in even the relatively high-level Java.

So, the author is right that we're getting more Pythonic, but he's wrong to say we'll all write in Python some day. Some day, something like Python will be the fast low level language, there will be new slower languages that are easier to use than Python, and C will be a memory. The evolution of programming languages will never end, not in our lifetime certainly, and probably not as long as we walk the earth.

I must say though that I pray for more convergence. It annoys me to write code in JavaScript and Python, having to remember subtle differences between the two as small as capitalization of true and False, and tricky pitfalls like the scope of a variable declared in an if block.

It does seem an unnecessary burden for me as a web developer to have to know a handful of languages. You can hardly make a website today without knowing HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python/Ruby, and you better know your SQL too. Then, let's talk APIs.

Some day we will stop writing COBOL.

C is portable assembly, I see no reason for it to disappear, and actually it would bother me to have to write low-level stuff in python.

Is this better?

map(partial(reduce, +), partition(7, 7, daily))

Personally I'd be much much more happy to be using this code than the snippet in the article. In fact, I don't program Python regularly and it did take quite a while to figure out what was going on in the code.

weekly = [sum(daily[j:j+7]) for j in range(0, len(daily), 7)]

Now if you look back at the top snippet, its just normal function calls, so you can be happy to know what's going on after reading documentation for the names "partition" and "daily".

If you don't know what "map", "partial", "reduce" and "+" mean, sure you have to look up their documentation too, but they occur frequently enough that you can remember what they do after that.

The Clojure version is much more high level and less likely to introduce bugs.

Edit:

Oh and it should be said that "sum" is equivalent to partial(reduce, +) so I can now say:

map(sum, partition(7, 7, daily))

See? The code is just melting away before your eyes. Also note how I have literally no idea what either of the snippets do but am already happily changing one of them.

> The only reason to write in a language like C or Java today (over Python) is speed.

Do you really believe that?