Just why did people start using Python anyway?

http://ndanger.org/blog/2008/10/08/adopting-functional-programming-or-just-why-did-people-start-using-python-anyway/

by prakash • 18 years ago

22 44 18 years ago

SirWart• 18 years ago

Python is simple, easy to read, and has been around and active since 1991. Because of that, it also benefits from being a very stable, fast platform (for an interpreted language), and has a huge standard library (http://docs.python.org/modindex.html). If it's not in the standard library, you can probably find it somewhere. A "killer app" is a paradigm that computer people have been using since visicalc, but I'm not sure it applies to every situation.

olefoo• 18 years ago

Because one of the major problems of writing code in collaboration with other programmers is communicating the meaning of existing code. And python is one of the few languages out there that had an explicit goal of being legible.

dustineichler• 18 years ago

yeah i second this point.

i'm a fairly large perl project at work and it makes me want to poke my eyes out.

python on the other hand always makes me smile. it's simple and elegant.

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

I'll point out that it is for this exact reason that we're using Fortress: for scientific code, it's so much more readable it's amazing.

prakash2• 18 years ago

So, Chapel. Erlang, CUDA, etc. aren't as readable as Fortress?

mdasen• 18 years ago

I'd argue that Python goes beyond legibility of code since most of the Python community seems to have settled on very similar coding standards. Not just silly things like 4-space indents, but the way the code is written. It makes it really easy to pick up foreign Python code.

The explicit over implicit here also helps. Yes, it is a pain when dealing with only your code (why do I have to keep doing self.var_name when Java just lets me say var_name), but when dealing with foreign code, it means you have explicit scope.

I'd also argue that Python's import is just wonderful. Where many languages like their secret-sauce methods, Python's explicit imports makes it incredibly simple to find where a name is coming from. While Java has the convention of import java.util.*, Python has the convention of from math import log - which imports the name log into your file. So, you see log used in the file, you can easily look at the import to see where it's coming from - and yes, it isn't hard to imagine identical names in different libraries and you shouldn't need to know that something with the same name is defined in two places that usually aren't used together. Want the whole math library, just import math and then use math.func() so that you still know where everything is coming from!

For what it's worth, I think Python's syntax is a bit ugly, but it's standard! Python code never looks that foreign and having foreign code look familiar to you is just wonderful. It might not matter when you have your 1-person project, but when dealing with the code of other's, it's wonderful.

silentbicycle9• 18 years ago

It makes it really easy to pick up foreign Python code.

You really can't overestimate how big a deal this is.

ii• 18 years ago

No killer apps? What about this http://www.python.org/about/quotes/ ?

davidw6• 18 years ago

I started using Python in 1999, because I was tired of Perl's weirdness and looking for something new. I don't use it much these days, but still have a lot of respect for it.

prakash2• 18 years ago

what do you use these days?

davidw6• 18 years ago

I got more involved with Tcl over time ( http://tcl.apache.org/ and some other stuff) and over the past couple of years have been moving towards Ruby for most of my scripting/web needs.

baha_man• 18 years ago

"Haskell... even has an Emacs mode."

Is there a programming language which doesn't have an Emacs mode?

silentbicycle9• 18 years ago

I don't think there are major modes for brainfuck or unlambda.

I thought about writing one, but then came to my senses.

razzmataz• 18 years ago

if you are writing brainfuck code, I doubt you are going to use emacs as your environment. More likely ed or cat...

gopher• 18 years ago

Because other people used it, composed good code and even others adopted it. This resulted in a high-profile Python scene and good code. I think that many new ideas were contributed and it was fun to share ideas. This resulted in a rapid development of toolkits, frameworks and software. If you wanted to be part of this, you had to use Python.

But I think it is the same with JavaScript, Ruby, FreeBSD, PosgreSQL and many more hip foobars; In contrast, Java, PHP, many (not all) Microsoft products, Linux (partly) allured so many bad coders that it is simply boring to work through their code.

silentbicycle9• 18 years ago

I tried Python out right when I was getting incredibly frustrated with a Perl program that had grown too large for its own good. Python seemed so much cleaner that I switched immediately. Its standard library is quite nice, though not quite as large as CPAN.

Ironically, I may be switching from Python to Lua now, for the same reason.

nuclear_eclipse2• 18 years ago

In all seriousness, the only reason I use Python over Lua is for the library. Lua is far more flexible and extensible, but it has a very sore lack of standard libraries like you can find with Python. But I keep my fingers crossed, and continue to use Lua as an interpreter inside my C apps, where the lack of libraries is a non-issue because everything I need to use is a custom API exported from C.

silentbicycle9• 18 years ago

> but it has a very sore lack of standard libraries like you can find with Python

Agreed. I find it quite a bit more elegant overall, and I decided to just jump in and do my throwaway scripts in Lua and see how much of a difference that makes. If I like it enough to write a few small libraries along the way, everybody wins.

Lua has tail-call elimination, coroutines, closures, and lambdas. I'm pretty sure Python has none of these, except for (possibly) a limited form of coroutines. (The Python lambda is too crippled, its closures are broken.) Lua is also one of the most deliberately portable languages I've seen, too. I have a hunch it would be a great language for bootstrapping a Lisp or Scheme compiler, though I haven't tried this yet.

tricky• 18 years ago

I found Stackless Python while trying to throw together an idea for a massively parallel algorithm... worked beautifully and led me to django. Python's simplicity made me feel like I could hit the ground running, but I'd say the frameworks got me hooked.

jcl• 18 years ago

The article is mistitled. The question it actually poses is: "Why isn't Haskell as popular as Python yet?"

While I dearly love Python, I don't know enough about Haskell to adequately answer this. The article makes it sound like Haskell is doing all the same right things as Python -- although this apparently isn't paying off yet, so the article must be overlooking some factors.

Just why did people start using Python anyway?

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