Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/07/21/python-has-brought-computer-programming-to-a-vast-new-audience

by leonagano • 8 years ago

252 261 8 years ago

economist.com

drpgq• 8 years ago

Python is certainly way better for a layman trying to do small things than C++

whatever12• 8 years ago

True, but for me that python was my 4th CL (after fortran, c, c++), there were lots of gotchas, specially with implicit type conversions, mutable classes, and passing by value / reference which all seemed quite arbitrary in my first steps.

Maybe for a complete beginner these are no-issues.

llukas• 8 years ago

Can you explain implicit type conversions problems in python?

sputknick• 8 years ago

Very appropriate timing. My son wanted to learn programming, so we started yesterday with python, using Jupyter notebooks on Azure (notebooks.azure.com). No setup, easy to create little code snippets, and he can do it all from his Chromebook. Python is intuitive, simple, useful; best first language in my opinion.

throwaway57523• 8 years ago

I remember hating the whitespace thing so much when I started with Python circa 2.4, but have really come to love the language in a lot of domains since then.

A huge, huge "thank you" to Mr. van Rossum for creating this quirky language that I've become so fond of and for the countless hours of his life he's given to the project.

irishcoffee• 8 years ago

from __future__ import braces

I hated the white-space thing until I discovered that. For whatever reason this made me get over myself and learn to love the tab/space argument that is somewhat akin to the vi/emacs argument.

throwaway57523• 8 years ago

I know that now. 2.4 was a long time ago... there is some serious wisdom behind that decision/PEP-8/"import this" that took me a while to appreciate. Humans beings are the weak link in developing software, and language decisions that nudge towards highly readable code are productivity decisions.

Waterluvian• 8 years ago

You monster. Not a chance.

mockingbirdy8• 8 years ago

Oh, I see. I use spaces and vim (I do, but who cares). Let's start a flamewar. /s

Every time I think about tabs/spaces, I think about that episode in Silicon Valley [1]. Hilariously accurate, I have the exact same feeling when somebody uses the mouse to copy something or navigate. The cringe makes me feel alive (I guess this is the ultimate reason for those flamewars. And neurotic tendencies, of course).

[1] https://youtu.be/SsoOG6ZeyUI

danso7• 8 years ago

Same here. I remember that one of my first attempts at trying out Python, coming from Ruby, seeing that indentation compilation error made me immediately give up. Hard to give up the freewheeling nature of Ruby but I am very glad that I did. "Use whatever style makes you happy" has extremely diminishing returns the more you code in a language.

tryptophan• 8 years ago

I've grown to accept it. However, sometimes I wish we had something to replace braces like some IDE coloring schemes to clearly represent indentation levels. In larger programs it gets difficult to tell apart levels sometimes.

elorant• 8 years ago

The great advantage of Python is the vast amount of libraries out there for pretty much anything you can think of. As a C# developer that's the one thing, and probably the only, that I envy from Python.

helthanatos• 8 years ago

I really dislike converting Python to a different language. What type is this? Go 5 libraries down to find out ;)

politician3• 8 years ago

That's a common misunderstanding. Python's type system is in the unit tests necessary to ensure the code is doing what it should. This is a boon because all of the behavioral rules are co-located for efficient reference. ;)

bow_• 8 years ago

Back when I was getting more serious about programming (2010-ish), I had to decide between Perl vs Python as those two were the most widely used in my domain (bioinformatics).

I remember one of the argument for Perl was exactly this: the vast number of libraries in CPAN. You would be able to do tasks much quicker because you would just need to install these libraries and go on with your tasks.

Still, I decided to go with Python because it made so many 'click' for me about programming in general + because of its REPL, among other things.

It turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made :).

vgy7ujm3• 8 years ago

Meh.. try Perl.

EGreg• 8 years ago

Why?

vgy7ujm3• 8 years ago

Peel makes me happy, Python makes me want to go to sleep.

lainproliant2• 8 years ago

When I was younger I used Perl for a lot of the things that I use Python for today: websites, command line tools, and one-off scripts. It's not a bad tool, and it has real strengths, especially for short one-off scripts.

I was in the pedantic "meaningful whitespace is evil" camp back then, so I avoided Python. Then I got an internship in a house that used Python. That forced me to give Python a real try and I got over the whitespace thing... I learned that for all intents and purposes this language I had been scoffing was a better tool for many of my usual Perl use cases and more thanks to its extensive standard library.

random_upvoter• 8 years ago

For me it's somewhat strange that it is universally presented as a beginner's language. Python would be hugely confusing to me if I didn't keep the underlying C model -- dynamically allocated objects with reference counts -- in mind at all time. Together with a lot of protocol that is largely arbitrary.

tdb7893• 8 years ago

I've met a lot of people who have programmed simple things in python without understanding the memory model at all so for most people it doesn't seem to be a large impediment.

xxpor• 8 years ago

To me that would only be relevant if I'm doing super performance sensitive stuff, and if that's the case I wouldn't be using Python.

I've been programming in both C and Python for years and never once have I had to consider reference counting in Python.

criddell• 8 years ago

Would you also find Excel macros hugely confusing if you didn't know the underlying C model? Because I think that's the level of programming that the masses are doing.

ummonk• 8 years ago

In all this time I didn’t even know python uses reference counting instead of tracing gc...

xapata22• 8 years ago

It also uses mark-and-sweep.

    a = []
    a.append(a)

Can't collect that one with ref counting.

ASinclair• 8 years ago

Can you provide an example of why you need to understand the underlying C model?

I don't think I've ever considered it when writing a Python program.

danso7• 8 years ago

When teaching Python to beginners, I struggle with the concept of mutability -- e.g. `sorted(mylist) vs mylist.sort()` without being able to refer to the concepts of memory and references. But it's not a terrible obstacle if you drill in extra adherence to logic and testing and jumping into REPL. After enough trial-and-error with `x is y` `x == y` and `id(x)`, the abstract concept comes through without having to acknowledge the existence of reference count.

alimw• 8 years ago

Hardly a beginner at programming, but I also struggled with this when I picked up Python recently. The documentation doesn't make it obvious when functions have this sort of side effect, so like your students I play with the REPL to establish exactly what a function will do. Even then an unexpected side effect was the source of the single most perplexing bug in my program. I imagine that in complex programs this philosophy of sometimes-mutability-sometimes-not must lie at the root of a huge amount of programming error.

pm902• 8 years ago

Python is a great language to start programming in. My biggest frustration with traditional programming languages (well, C/Java mostly) was just how much upfront effort and understand is required to do useful stuff. Whereas with python it is pretty easy to whip up a script, read input and transform it into output in real time etc.

That said, I think its also important for Python programmers to dabble at least a little bit with Java to really understand how OOP works. Python does have OOP but it has certain quirks which can confuse newcomers. Java helped to clarify my understanding of OOP a lot, even though I've only used it marginally.

meowface7• 8 years ago

Other than interfaces and generics (which would make no sense to add in Python, since it's dynamically typed), can you name some OOP features Java has that Python doesn't have?

Alex39172• 8 years ago

can you name some OOP features Java has that Python doesn't have?

Encapsulation. In Python you can write code in an OO style and benefit from inheritance, but it’s really only good for people writing libraries and frameworks. For end user code, objects are best avoided because they can pick up state in unexpected ways, which leads to problems that are extremely difficult to debug.

pm902• 8 years ago

This may sound super n00b but I really like that Java is explicit about everything. So for instance, you explicitly specify variables, methods as private with the keyword 'private'. In python you have to use an underscore, and its still not really private, its obfuscated. That's just one example, but in general I really like that kind of by-the-book verbosity, instead of having to mentally map it into the OOP concepts.

nishantvyas• 8 years ago

W/O going into the war of I'm better than you (Python vs JAVA)... Python is built to make it easy to write good programs... where as JAVA is built to make it hard to write bad programs.... same objective but different thinking/approach to achieve it... hence one(Python) would eventually have larger adoption....

kickopotomus• 8 years ago

I agree with this sentiment but it is a bit of a double edged sword for Python professionally. There is some really good Python code out there but there is also a lot of bad stuff too. I know this can be said for every language but I think I have seen it most in languages like JS and Python because of the ease of access.

eikenberry• 8 years ago

I don't think Java's take on OOP is good to learn before you really understand OOP already. Its heavy handed style of OOP really hasn't aged that well and is rightfully being avoided in all newer languages.

kjeetgill11• 8 years ago

I couldn't agree more. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but I had the opposite experience. Learning basics of functional programming in Python improved my OOP in Java over time.

I think it's probably more like this: learning a second, contrasting topic really helps explore the motivations that drive their respective goals.

OOP and Functional are broad classes of contrasting design patterns and philosophies but share the common idea: be principled about state.

kjeetgill11• 8 years ago

I'm going to chime in to 100% agree with you. I'm a big fan of both of those languages and their respective ecosystems.

I'm in love with the idea that there a good case of polyglot (biglot?) program synergy between the two. Keep your eyes open on Jython and GraalPython!

oh-kumudo2• 8 years ago

There is not an Universal OOP specification to follow.

In Java's case, a lot OOP flavor's design patterns are created due to Java's lacking of some primitives like closure/lambda and higher-order functions back in its old days.

In short, Java's OOP solves many problems that are unique to Java and could be easily avoided in other languages.

lainproliant2• 8 years ago

Not only is Python easy to learn for beginners, it allows for some deeply expressive constructs and patterns that are difficult or impossible in other languages. This is why even though I started with C/C++ and Java pays the bills, Python is where my heart is. Thanks Guido.

Scarbutt• 8 years ago

Well yes, if you come from C/C++/Java, Python is going to feel that way ;)

dfee• 8 years ago

There seems to be a sentiment that Python is a kids language - but I think of Python as a language that scales with your experience. You can do some really interesting and complex things and I’m really appreciative of my deep understanding of the language through a decade of heavy use, open source contribution, and project ownership.

Recently I released a package which allows you to dynamically create or change function signatures and went deep into `typing` and `inspect`, and found the experience rewarding.

https://pypi.org/project/python-forge/

tomnipotent2• 8 years ago

There seems to be a sentiment that Python is a kids language

I only hear this from developers that have never used Python or work in problem domains where the language is genuinely not better (e.g. low-latency distributed services, embedded devices/IoT sensors).

I've scaled Python & PHP web apps to a hundred million monthly visitors on Top 20 US destinations on very limited hardware (6-10 machines). It's surprising how much you can get out of the language if you know how to take advantage of the strengths.

antt4• 8 years ago

Even IoT sensors are easier to program with micropython.

What I find worrying is the the language is changing to suit those people, e.g. type hints, rather than teaching them learning to use the language. You don't complain you can't use a hammer as a screw driver, you just don't use a hammer.

rch• 8 years ago

English is a kids language... sure you can use it for your PhD thesis and the rest of your career, but there's no disputing that a lot of kids know it too; parts anyway.

kamaal2• 8 years ago

>There seems to be a sentiment that Python is a kids language

Python is like the new Basic.

Very easy to work with, so a lot of people would be using it. Like volumes of people.

tim333• 8 years ago

Python also gets used for some serious stuff in a way that Basic never did. CERN use it to control their systems, 'Try Ubuntu' to install a second operating system, Youtube to play videos and so on.

danso7• 8 years ago

But in the past 12 months Google users in America have searched for Python more often than for Kim Kardashian, a reality-TV star.

This seemed so unlikely that I thought the Economist had incorrectly used the Google Trends comparison tool, but they are right:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F05z...

The gap is even bigger when you consider a worldwide audience (i.e. one less focused on American gossip):

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F05z1_,%2Fm...

chatmasta• 8 years ago

To be fair, a single python dev is going to search for queries about python dozens of times per day. Even the most ardent Kardashian fan is unlikely to search for Kardashians in any volume even close to that.

StavrosK5• 8 years ago

I find your lack of dedication disheartening.

kjeetgill11• 8 years ago

If we're using Google to approximate mind share them it's skewed way farther than that. Nobody who follows the then is sitting doing Google searches. They're already following them on Snapchat, Facebook, Insta, and Twitter.

You only get searches with breaking tmz news.

... I say this with detailed observations of my girlfriend's media habits.

rossdavidh• 8 years ago

I put in Beyoncé (with or without accent) and Kylie Jenner, and Python still looks higher on most days. Surprising.

riazrizvi3• 8 years ago

The thing I love most about the language is its conciseness, on several levels.

It's syntactically concise because of its use of whitespace and indentation instead of curly braces.

Expressions are often concise because of things like list slicing and list expressions.

It can be linguistically concise, because it is so easy to fiddle with the data model of your classes, to customize their behavior at a deeper level. For example, it is so quick to design a suite of classes that have algebraic operators, which leads to elegant mathematical expressions of your custom GUI objects for example. But you can also change the way classes are instantiated by overriding Class.__new__ which I've used to make powerful libraries that are a joy to use.

Further elegance can be added through creative use of the flexible argument passing machinery, and the lovely way that functions are also objects.

Your application architecture tends to be concise because there are so many existing libraries, you can often design your application at a more interesting higher level. For example, you don't have to worry about the size of int's.

My big regret with Python 3.0 is that the scoping rules in list expressions changed to prohibit modification of variables in surrounding scope. This degraded the utility of list expressions. The work around is so long-winded.

Besides the odd gripe here and there, the language really gives me a warm glow.

hellofunk• 8 years ago

My big regret with Python 3.0 is that the scoping rules in list expressions changed to prohibit modification of variables in surrounding scope. This degraded the utility of list expressions. The work around is so long-winded.

Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what this is referring to.

duckerude6• 8 years ago

In Python 2, "[x for x in range(10)]; print(x)" prints 9. x is available outside the list comprehension.

In Python 3, it raises a NameError, because the x in "print(x)" is not defined. It's contained in the list comprehension.

But I don't know a good use of the Python 2 behavior.

eesmith11• 8 years ago

In Python 2.x the loop variable is part of the containing scope:

  >>> a
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  NameError: name 'a' is not defined
  >>> [a*2 for a in (1,2,3)]
  [2, 4, 6]
  >>> a
  3

In Python 3.x, it is not:

  >>> a
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  NameError: name 'a' is not defined
  >>> [a*2 for a in (1,2,3)]
  [2, 4, 6]
  >>> a
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  NameError: name 'a' is not defined

It is sometimes useful to know why something failed. The following Python 2 code will not work in Python 3:

  >>> import math
  >>> try:
  ...   values = [math.sqrt(x) for x in (1, 2, -3, 4)]
  ... except ValueError:
  ...   print("cannot compute sqrt(%r)" % x)
  ...
  cannot compute sqrt(-3)

I have mostly found this feature of Python 2 to be useful on the interactive shell, when trying to diagnose what caused an error in my list comprehension. Eg.

  >>> with open("tmp.dat") as input_file:
  ...   fields = [line.split()[3] for line in input_file]
  ...
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
  IndexError: list index out of range
  >>> line
  'one two three\n'

Oops, there are only 3 columns, not 4.

throwaway57523• 8 years ago

"Besides the odd gripe here and there, the language really gives me a warm glow."

That's a perfect summary of my feeling towards it, too. If the PSF puts up a GoFundMe for sending Guido on a nice vacation of his choosing, I will be happy to chip in a few bucks. Same goes for Linus when he hands over the reins, and a few other maintainers who probably cannot be adequately compensated for the impact of their work.

bb882• 8 years ago

Ask Naomi Ceder who is the chair of the PSF. She's super nice.

stevesimmons• 8 years ago

I agree. I came to Python in 2000, after Perl (1996-1998), PHP (1999), Matlab (1992-1996), C++ (1990), Fortran (1989), C (1988), Pascal (1988), Assembly (1984-86) and Basic (1981-83).

After all those, I found Python, as the saying goes, really does "fit your brain" [1]. Since discovering Python 18 years ago, I have looked at Haskell, successfully avoided Java, and promised myself to "one day" do more JS. Still, Python remains 95% of what I do, and I don't see a problem with that :)

[1] "Python fits your brain" was the theme of the 9th International Python Convention in 2001.

iscrewyou• 8 years ago

I went through a course in python about a decade ago and I enjoyed it! Then along the way, I picked it up here and there. Then used it at work for a few months to sort through a lot of data.

Recently I started trying to learn swift through the Stanford course. And the curly brackets confused the heck out of me. They still do! They just seem to pop up out of nowhere. All to say , I completely agree with your second paragraph. Python is very concise.

bb882• 8 years ago

Usually braces define the scope (or lifetimes) of variables.

C/C++/Java use them quite a bit.

jplayer01• 8 years ago

Curly brackets fulfill the exact same function as indenting a code block in Python - it defines scope and ties code together.

eigenvalue• 8 years ago

It's also nicely self-contained, especially if you use a distribution like Anaconda. You don't have to spend hours fighting with the configuration and tooling. It's also very easy to debug and step through code using Spyder, which is similar to MATLAB. It makes it easy for someone who is smart and generally competent with computers to be productive in a short amount of time without first amassing huge amounts of arcane knowledge-- knowledge that isn't actually helpful to making working code!

Barrin92• 8 years ago

agreed with all the posts above, the only real letdown for me was always the difficulty to produce standalone executables. I would really love a python equivalent to uberjars or go's build tool.

sidlls• 8 years ago

I've found it very difficult to "self-contain" python projects that are even of modest size. Anaconda is a mediocre solution that is the best among other terrible options.

UncleEntity3• 8 years ago

My big regret with Python 3.0 is that the scoping rules in list expressions changed to prohibit modification of variables in surrounding scope. This degraded the utility of list expressions. The work around is so long-winded.

Ironically, the PEP to add this to py3k is what's causing all the fuss in pythonland lately.

riazrizvi3• 8 years ago

Actually I think it was 'fixed' as a syntax change in Python 3, https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.0.html#changed-syntax "List comprehensions no longer support the syntactic form..."

nikofeyn• 8 years ago

do you know an ML language like sml, ocaml, or f#? if not, you should really give one a go, especially f#. the conciseness and cleanliness is just as good if not better than python, and there are far more options for data modeling and expression.

riazrizvi3• 8 years ago

CORRECTION: My regret was referring to a problem where this code worked in Python 2 but not Python 3:

    x = 100
    y = [x+i for i in range(2)]

In Python 3 I kept seeing

    NameError: name 'x' is not defined

However, after working around this problem with fixes like this -

    x = 100
    y = (lambda x=x: [x+i for i in range(2)])()

I have just discovered that the different scope treatment was due to a problem with IPython when using it in embed mode, for example by calling it with the following command:

    $ python -c "import IPython;IPython.embed()"

It goes away when you call ipython directly

    $ ipython

I mistakenly attributed this problem to Python 3 for years, I guess I introduced the problem because I had a different way of invoking Python 2 and Python 3 - yeesh.

ufo3• 8 years ago

The Brian analogy was a surprisingly apt way to explain the PEP 572 kerfuffle

andreygrehov8• 8 years ago

For some reason, I never liked Python. I don't know... its classes look weird with all those self, __init__, etc. The __init__.py for packages is also a strange choice to me. It has classes, but no interfaces. The language is even slower than PHP. Does Python have type hinting? What all the hype is about? I just don't get it.

danso7• 8 years ago

What other language are you comparing Python's flaws and tradeoffs to?

andreygrehov8• 8 years ago

Java, PHP, C#, heck, even JavaScript/ES[6,7]. I feel like Python has a lot of its own ways of doing things, whereas a more idiomatic approach is imho a better way to go. Why the hell in the world would you call a class constructor as __init__? Pretty much every popular OOP language does it either by naming a constructor the same name as the class name or through some form of a `construct` notation. Why `self` and not `this`? I mean, I know that the language has a very low entry barrier, but wouldn't it make sense to design it in a more traditional way?

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        main()

Code like that just doesn't make any sense to me.

noname120• 8 years ago

Yes, Python has type hinting since 3.5[1].

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/

yen223• 8 years ago

To be clear, Python has had type annotations for a while now, but the default CPython interpreter doesn't use that information to optimise performance.

xapata22• 8 years ago

No interfaces?

    from collections.abc import Sequence

Slower?

    import numpy as np

andreygrehov8• 8 years ago

You're referring to duck typing, which to me contradicts the Zen of Python: Explicit is better than implicit.

Slower?

Yes, overall the language is slower than PHP. It's not a bad thing, just the result of benchmarks. It doesn't mean one should stop writing Python.

cm21872• 8 years ago

Agree. I can't understand people praising the lightness and readability while at the same time stuffing their code with underscores. Also it seems often inconsistent. Like some functions are used as prefix (len(x)) while other are suffix (x.clear()), I assume for historical reasons. Or like the "b if a else c" which reverse the logical order (you evaluate the condition then you can tell if you go one way or another). Same for [x for x in list], the Linq approach is more logical (for x in list select x).

I understand why people like it. And I like scripting languages, it's nice to find a piece of script somewhere and being able to edit it directly having to find the correct source code and recompiling. But it has lots of shortfalls and quirks too (multi-threading, dependencies management, deployment, no refactoring/static checking, python 2 vs 3, 50 different kinds of strings, APIs full of abbreviations which probably meant something to their creators 20 years ago, etc).

It's a nice language, among others. Not an "ultimate" language by any means in my opinion.

meowface7• 8 years ago

Those are all valid gripes, but for most use-cases (where performance isn't critical), I haven't found anything better than Python yet. Ruby is an aesthetically nicer language and doesn't have those issues you mentioned in the first paragraph, but the Python ecosystem is amazing and better than Ruby's IMO. And compared to most other languages Python still feels very clean, terse, and pretty to me.

multi-threading

Most interpreted languages have a GIL, sadly. But yes, this is annoying.

dependencies management

Annoying, but resolved in part with new projects like pipenv, and also still a big issue for other popular languages.

deployment

Also helped by pipenv, and Facebook's xar (https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar) is new but looks promising.

no refactoring/static checking

It's a dynamic language. But this is now possible to some extent with type hints.

python 2 vs 3

They did screw this up, yeah. Python 3 fixes a ton of issues and is a better language, but the backwards incompatibility created way too many problems.

50 different kinds of strings

There are 2 kinds: bytes and unicode.

APIs full of abbreviations which probably meant something to their creators 20 years ago

Can you give some examples? This is an issue in a few of the old standard libraries, but even then it's not too common. This is way, way more prevalent in PHP and C than in Python.

KirinDave16• 8 years ago

Read the comments here. Look at the diversity of opinions and the number of them that, while professing love for Python, directly contradict each other. Python is verbose|concise, simple|advanced, disciplined|experimental, modern|classical.

It goes to show: something doesn't need to be actually-better. It doesn't need to be actually-simpler. It doesn't need to make your job easier or better. It needs to make people think it does that.

Python is not, in any way, revolutionary. Several contemporaries exist with similar design constraints. But Python persists because it's created a community that considers itself hygienic for avoiding any other aspect of programming. And by doing this, it can be superlative in any aspect it wants to be. It simply conjures the worst example from any given competitor and those are, by proxy, pushed onto all of them.

Did we see a glowing review of how Javascript did this? No. Javascript, despite being the most deployed programming environment family in human history, didn't do this. Python did. Because it says so, over and over.

Even if you disagree with that assessment, I think Python has had a lot less to do with pushing python to new audiences. Its community has projected it outward with an impressive degree of vigor over the years, forcing it on more and more people.

danso7• 8 years ago

It goes to show: something doesn't need to be actually-better. It doesn't need to be actually-simpler. It doesn't need to make your job easier or better. It needs to make people think it does that.

I don't agree with that takeaway. You ask us to consider all the diversity of opinions here, but then you evaluate them out of context, what one person says about Python is not necessarily in reference to the metrics that another has laid out, hence, they don't "directly contradict each other".

To claim that "oh you all just think Python is less verbose than Java, but it's all hype and no fact" is utter absurdity. You seem to have had bad experience that make you think Pythonistas are the tech world's Jehovah Witnesses, when plenty of other programmers will make the same case against Javascript (especially in the Node.js context).

Why do you think Python, or any programming language, has to be "revolutionary" -- or engage in cultmindthink -- for it to become popular?

edit: added "or engage in cultmindthink"

KirinDave16• 8 years ago

Why do you think Python, or any programming language, has to be "revolutionary" -- or engage in cultmindthink -- for it to become popular?

I don't think it has to, and I didn't say you HAVE to. I'm saying that you can accomplish the goal with a community that prides itself on ignoring things. Python's community is even more insular and ensconced in their opinion than editor proponents. Most Vi proponents can tell you about how they know Emacs and hate it (and vice versa). In the Python world, not knowing these things is in fact often a purity test, with GVR doing some kind of classic, "I'm just a hyperchicken lawyer" gag reel in public while in private engaging in complex debates about the very concepts he claims are inherently not understandable.

duckerude6• 8 years ago

Not all of those are contradictory. For example, Python mostly stays away from cryptic syntax and implicit behavior, making it verbose, but it finds powerful ways to express common patterns, making it concise. You get a small amount of readable explicit code. The words are antonyms if you pick their meanings carefully, but they don't have to be.

Python's design isn't revolutionary, but it's good and the language happened to become popular. So it's not just well-designed, but it also has all the libraries and resources and network effects that you don't get just from having a well-designed language. I'm sure a lot of it was dumb luck, but I like the result.

JavaScript's design had much less impact on its success than Python's design did on Python's success. It was doing the right thing in the right place at the right time, and how it did that wasn't all that important - once it turned into a web standard it wasn't going away.

KirinDave16• 8 years ago

Not all of those are contradictory. For example, Python mostly stays away from cryptic syntax and implicit behavior, making it verbose, but it finds powerful ways to express common patterns, making it concise.

Unsurprisingly, I disagree with this opinion. Python code is typically nearly as much as a slog as Go code, but adopts all the brutally hard parts of the common lisp's functional world by only exposing wrap-primitives.

JavaScript's design had much less impact on its success than Python's design did on Python's success. It was doing the right thing in the right place at the right time, and how it did that wasn't all that important - once it turned into a web standard it wasn't going away.

The Python community would have us believe this. I think it's a profoundly biased and one-sided reading of the history that paints a bullseye around the target. Python's primary innovation is a community that doesn't embrace differences and growth, but rather hates and hazes it. And when change finally does happen, it happens in the way most likely to cause everyone heartache, as if to fulfill the prophecy the community made.

wslh• 8 years ago

Python is not, in any way, revolutionary. Several contemporaries exist with similar design constraints.

I think it was revolutionary in its own terms. For example, list slicing was revolutionary and it reduced many lookups to the minimum. Sure, it was implemented by other (not so popular) programming languages before but not in addition of many other features like easy interpreter embedding, good reflection/metaprogramming, straightforward bindings, unicode, etc.

Now in 2018 all these things are discussable and we can objectively criticize eternal issues (e.g. interpreter lock) but Python showed that you can write applications in a concise way without a lot of boilerplate. I would love to see a programming language that progresses from this point.

KirinDave16• 8 years ago

I think it was revolutionary in its own terms.

I think this is precisely what I said. If you discount any other competitor and what they did, Python was revolutionary within itself. Which is not all bad, it means the language has had progress. But it's a very narrow metric.

xapata22• 8 years ago

A Javascript array comprehension [0] in theory is similar to a Python list comprehension [1]. However, the slight difference in syntax makes Python dramatically easier to read and write. Javascript dropped the feature. Pythonistas use it often.

Many programmers, even Python core devs, don't understand what makes one syntax more readable than another.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#list-...

KirinDave16• 8 years ago

"However, the slight difference in syntax makes Python dramatically easier to read and write"

Please prove it.

eesmith11• 8 years ago

I believe SQL is "the most deployed programming environment family in human history". SQLite is seemingly everywhere.

Your second paragraph does not follow from the first. It could instead be that HN commenters are poor at this sort of analysis, or that people in general are poor at this sort of analysis.

What were the contemporaries with similar design constraints? I started looking at Python in 1995, and the major alternatives were Perl and Tcl. I don't remember anything close than those to Python.

I agree that Python is not revolutionary. I don't agree with your statement "avoiding any other aspect of programming". Van Rossum's ABC experience strongly influenced his ideas in how programming should be accessible to non-professional programmers, and that type of design is certainly an aspect of programming, though often overlooked.

I really don't understand "forcing it on more and more people." In some sense it's true - Python is a widely used teaching language, and as such the teachers are forcing ever more students to learn it; Python is the de facto required language for a number of fields, so again people are 'forced' to use it because their tools are often in Python.

But I don't think that's the type of force you mean?

KirinDave16• 8 years ago

I believe SQL is "the most deployed programming environment family in human history". SQLite is seemingly everywhere.

How many computers have a browser on them vs an interactive and instructable version of an SQL server?

kamaal2• 8 years ago

>I believe SQL is "the most deployed programming environment family in human history".

Actually that is Microsoft Excel.

Both SQL and Python will never come close to the ubiquity Microsoft Excel has.

orf3• 8 years ago

No. Javascript, despite being the most deployed programming environment family in human history, didn't do this.

It's definitely not.

KirinDave16• 8 years ago

What programming environment more deployed?

It's surely the case that other binary interpreters are more deployed. But shipped interpreter with free input, a runtime, debugger and (for nearly every implementation, an interactive visual editor).

zwkrt• 8 years ago

I gather the exact opposite opinion of you: when something is aesthetically pleasing people will come up with rationalizations for why they like it, even if the real reason is difficult to describe. Similar to how in a focus group you can judge people's overall opinion but you should not focus on their specific feedback.

KirinDave16• 8 years ago

I am involved in many, many language communities. I've shipped software to production audiences of varying sizes in C, C++, Perl5, Common Lisp (Allegro), Common Lisp (SBCL), Ruby, Python, Scala, Ocaml, Java, JavaScript, Clojure, Haskell, F#, Typescript, Purescript, and Pony (finally!). I've used many more languages for non-trivial projects, including some now some defunct but really beautiful contenders like Nim, Io, Pike, Perl 6, Factor, Elisp, Vimscript, Coq and Idris. That's off the top of my head, I'm forgetting at least half a dozen more.

Python's community certainly feels distinct to me in this way.

But this is, of course, subjective. Your mileage may vary.

polotics2• 8 years ago

I am sorry but this does not compute: how is it "forced" on audiences?

maxerickson2• 8 years ago

For best results, read in the voice of the Architect.

More seriously, Python borrowed list comprehensions and the like from other programming languages and Javascript said "Hey, that's a good idea.".

jimbokun2• 8 years ago

Success and popularity of a programming language is mostly determined by the platforms it supports and the libraries it has available.

Objective C and now Swift is popular because you need to use one of them (without going to great lengths to avoid it) to write iOS apps. Javascript is popular because you need it to write web apps.

C and C++ are popular because they run almost everywhere, and are the implementation languages of many operating systems and software platforms.

You need Java to develop Android, and it has an incredible amount of libraries for server side web application development.

In a similar vein, TensorFlow and Numpy/Scipy makes Python the de facto language for machine learning, "data science" and scientific programming. It also has an amazing amount of libraries for web application development, text processing, and many other common programming tasks.

Libraries and community/popularity create a positive feedback loop. Large communities create more high quality libraries, which draw in more developers, which create more libraries, etc.

All of this is to say, I don't think much of your observations about Python's design and technical qualities and evolution have much bearing on Python's success one way or another, or for any other programming language. By design or accident, Guido managed to create a community that wrote a lot of useful libraries for many different kinds of tasks, that led to the positive feedback loop leading to Python's current popularity. "Forcing" is not an appropriate term for describing this phenomenon, I think, more accurate to say they have attracted a large community by making Python useful for many different tasks.

mockingbirdy8• 8 years ago

Am I the only who thinks that "90% of American parents want their kids to be computer scientists" is rather unsettling?

The market is currently full of people who are in for the money and will continue to be. It will be filled with people until supply meets demand. That the salaries will drop significantly is a natural result of this.

We had this pork cycle for teachers, doctors and other highly trained people. No one is benefitting from too many people who drive the prices down (although I'm not gonna say something as an employer, companies are happy about it - the profit margin will shrink but this can be compensated for using scaling). Those that are in for the money will leave (or continue to suffer in an unfulfilling job) and those that have passion can't sustain themselves (we can see this trend in indie game development today).

crack-the-code• 8 years ago

Is there strong evidence that this will happen anytime soon? I've heard many arguments that claim this wouldn't happen anytime soon, particularly because of the level of difficulty and the required determination.

mockingbirdy8• 8 years ago

I don't know the situation in the US, but here in Germany the companies always say "Oh no, we don't have enough computer scientists" and continue to pay low salaries. Many people thought that CS grads were needed and chose it, but they earn average salaries and sometimes even have to fight for the good seats.

Our definition of skill shortage is that there are only 3 applicants for one open position. This means a skill shortage doesn't mean there's no one. It means that there are 3 people hoping for the job, but the companies would love to see as many as they can so they can push the salaries down.

particularly because of the level of difficulty and the required determination

Maybe my imagination is limited, but I think there's a finite set of things we need until it gets exponentially harder to make big leaps (all industrial nations suffer from this phenomenon in advanced sectors) - basically the law of diminishing marginal returns [1]. And we will continue to improve the developer experience so it gets easier to build computer programs.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingmargina...

booleandilemma• 8 years ago

Maybe it makes sense to encourage your kids to go into blue collar jobs. In a future teeming with code monkeys, plumbers and electricians are going to be highly valuable.

As for the current career programmers, maybe we should unionize before our jobs are being taken by kids coming out of 2 week bootcamps (who have been taking programming classes since kindergarten).

Tade0• 8 years ago

In a future teeming with code monkeys, plumbers and electricians are going to be highly valuable.

As a person who repaired quite a few toilets in their life

As for the current career programmers, maybe we should unionize before our jobs are being taken by kids coming out of 2 week bootcamps (who have been taking programming classes since kindergarten).

I've seen such people(well, they started learning in primary school, not in kindergarten, but nevertheless) and two things stand in the way of this scenario:

1. Barely anybody likes this line of work. I've had people who would really use some extra cash outright refuse to learn our trade because they found it boring. Apparently Our unique skill in the job market is an immunity to boredom.

2. There's more to this job than programming. There's also working in teams which, despite the focus of pretty much every western education system on this, is something that people seem to learn only after a good few years of full-time work.

Also people fresh out of college/bootcamps tend to fall for the typical "nerd traps" like trying to build beautiful abstractions where there is no time nor need for that.

gnarcoregrizz• 8 years ago

I found the source here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/184637/parents-students-compute...

I agree it is unsettling, and I'm one of those ones who studied computer science for no other reason than the American "follow your dreams" meme. There weren't a lot of kids in my CS department at school, and they definitely weren't the business school follow the money types. We have had quite a few applicants lately who can't program their way out of a wet paper bag, but we have also had quite a few very qualified ones who were rejected simply because there weren't enough open positions.

It's generally a challenging job despite the myths, and programmers seem to be good at making things worse and more complicated for themselves, thus requiring more resources (programmers) to fix things. Also, the field is becoming deep enough that there are all types of specialties. Right now, AI and cryptography specialists can probably command high salaries, while your jack-of-all-trades guys are becoming a dime a dozen

xapata22• 8 years ago

I believe widespread employment as programmers is the only possible way for the US economy to have a large middle class in the coming decades. Unionized manufacturing ain't coming back.

mockingbirdy8• 8 years ago

Sorry to disappoint you, but there won't be a large middle class in industrial nations. It will be gig-based and there will be a big group of people working hard who get nothing and a small group of people who are extremely wealthy and disconnected.

You don't like Fiverr? Imagine that our whole job market runs like this in the future. The profit margin will be extremely small.

You need a website or a logo? Create a Fiverr task. You think you're a better developer or designer than those Fiverr guys? Then wait a few years and you will see that the performance and quality will improve drastically because workers get desperate when the pork cycle hits them.

- - -

I'm not dreaming this up - this is already happening! And even employees are used like replaceable commodities e.g. big agencies have so many applicants that they say to their employees: "if you don't work hard for that shitty pay, you will be replaced immediately" - the agencies are clear about that and demonstrate their power. It's soul-crushing and I've seen great designers who get exploited in those power dynamics.

lordnacho• 8 years ago

Someone else said this on HN: Python is the second best language in almost every field of computing.

That's why there's a library for everything in Python.

It's limitations are also not terrible for most people. If you want super fast, you will know how to do that some other way. If you just want simple and easy to read, you use Python.

m45t3r• 8 years ago

Yep, a truly Jack of All Trades, Master of None. And this is fine.

qubax• 8 years ago

Someone else said this on HN: Python is the second best language in almost every field of computing.

It isn't. Frankly, it isn't even top 3 in any "field of computing" depending on how you define "field of computing".

What python has going for it is the evangelists who do a great job of spreading the word and of course funding - they have lots of money backing the language. Also, being an interpreted language, it has a much lower barrier to entry.

I'm not much of a fan of python and its block syntax - I very much prefer braces or markers delineating the beginning and end of code blocks.

Also, python wants to be everything ( functional, OO, imperative, etc ) and hence is the worst language to learn programming language topics in my humble opinion.

My hope is that python will serve as a "gateway drug" to other languages like ruby, ML, C/C++, SQL, etc. So that people will learn what programming and languages are rather using python as a glorified calculator which I'm sure many are doing.

timb072• 8 years ago

"My hope is that python will serve as a "gateway drug" to other languages like ruby, ML, C/C++, SQL"

Your inclusion of SQL in that list really shows you have no idea what you're talking about.

sunstone• 8 years ago

Some people have good taste for technologies and others do not.

polotics2• 8 years ago

Lots of money? Lots of unpaid volunteers! Compare with Java, Go, JS, Swift, even Rust!

f00_• 8 years ago

how do you define "field of computing"?

It's taught in most beginning CS courses, has wide adoption for scientific computing and business. It seems like most apps are prototyped in R/Python before functions get ported to c or parallelized with dask/spark/scala

python was never intended to be a functional language, but it has lambdas. ruby and C++ are both "functional, OO, imperative" in the same way.

C with classes and first class functions is probably the best language

deepaksurti• 8 years ago

> Also, python wants to be everything ( functional, OO, imperative, etc ) and hence is the worst language to learn programming language topics in my humble opinion.

I think it doesn't get the functional/imperative parts right as they seem to be patched onto it. It is just a scriptable, OO language and pretty good at it, when combined with it's batteries included et al.

OTOH, Common Lisp is everything and is great at it. IMHO, a language with only paradigm is very restrictive and rarely helps when solving real world problems as they can't be effectively modeled in one paradigm only.

That is why CL is just a joy to solve problems with. So is Python and anything else if that one major paradigm that it supports is a right fit for the problem at hand.

eesmith11• 8 years ago

This is likely a retread of the old saying that the WordStar commands were everyone's second favorite key bindings - http://www.mischel.com/diary/2005/08/22.htm .

For that matter, I remember an episode of Magnum PI where the person who hired Magnum had talked to a few other PIs, and hired Magnum because he was always second on their lists of good PIs.

kankanaads786• 8 years ago

It's really interesting. I am a beginner to python an just read the above article. it's really interesting and I too enjoy coding with python.

oh-kumudo2• 8 years ago

Python's core strength, among the half dozen of language I used in daily work, is that it is simple and focus on easy human expressiveness.

It is the best example of 'simple is hard' when done right. Its core abstractions are carefully selected and weaved in a way, using them to organize/orchestrate your thoughts is just natural and fluid.

Huge thanks to Guido for presenting the world such a meticulously crafted work.

devin• 8 years ago

  python -c "import this"

taeric3• 8 years ago

This seems misspoken. Python hasn't necessarily brought computer programming to a new audience. A new audience is being brought to computer programming. They just happen to be given python as their first steps.

There is nothing intrinsic to python that is helping these use cases. Some people like it. Some people don't. I have not seen studies showing any real advantage or disadvantage to it. Do those exist, and I've just missed them?

xapata22• 8 years ago

Perhaps. Or perhaps programming instructors like Python better. When I taught statistics, R was more popular and featureful for the task than Python, yet I chose to teach my students Python.

taeric3• 8 years ago

If the competition is R, I can see how python is a pretty language. I think R still has prettier charts, with ggplot. However, there can be little argument that it is a peculiar language.

That said, I don't see much that python really has going for it in the pretty scenario, either. Most of the examples that make it worth looking at get ugly as quickly as most any other programming language. And the error messages are no more helpful than any of a myriad other languages.

None of which is to say I think it is bad. Just I suspect it is getting credit for some intrinsic quality that doesn't really exist. It is getting used because it is the language people know is getting used.

ucarion• 8 years ago

In case anyone else was confused by the literary reference, "one with Nineveh and Tyre" is from Kipling's "Recessional":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessional_(poem)

Which, I think, is the poem that made "lest we forget" a well-known phrase (though the original is from the Bible).

Nineveh (now Mosul, Iraq) and Tyre (in Lebanon) were great cities of their time, but now mostly known for their ruins. In Britain, they're commonly used as symbols of foregone empires.

MarkMMullin• 8 years ago

To me, Python has represented the nice friendly face one can put on the mean nasty stuff written in C++

siddboots• 8 years ago

I think this comparison [1] in particular explains a lot of Python's continued success over the past 5-10 years. For a very long time, CRUD back-end programming was one of the biggest draws of new users to Python. In the last couple of years, interactive data analysis has completely overtaken it.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

timb072• 8 years ago

Nice reference to Karel Čapek's "R.U.R." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.).

yontherubicon• 8 years ago

Archive link for losers like me who can't get past the paywall: http://archive.is/8mRZ0

SilverSlash• 8 years ago

I just love Python. It's my favorite programming language for many reasons but one of them is writing python never feels like the language is working against you. Python always feels like it's helping you.

Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience

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