I Am Worried About The Future Of Python

http://www.ironfroggy.com/software/i-am-worried-about-the-future-of-python

by Floopsy • 14 years ago

218 199 14 years ago

ironfroggy.com

INTPenis• 14 years ago

Don't you worry about the future of Python, let me worry about blank! - Guido

shawabawa3• 14 years ago

Incase someone doesn't get this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0584440/quotes?qt=qt0361067

jayflux2• 14 years ago

"Python behind the webserver is a powerful tool and one that has enabled a lot of great sites and products and services. Unfortunately, once the content hits the wire, the Python stops."

Not sure if im being ignorant here but surely this is a problem for most server side languages? PHP, Ruby, Go, Perl would all suffer the same problems. Browser vendors only want to have JS client side for obvious reasons, this doesn't just affect python.

Js is clearly doing a fine job at client side programming, should we not be happy with that?

Why are people obsessed about creating a "jack of all trades" language instead of letting languages do what they do best?

Taken from the comments... "I suspect javascript will become like assembly and all languages targeting the browser platform will need to be compiled to javascript."

That sounds like hell to a front-end developer. Its bad enough learning coffeescript or other dialects if a company uses them, but other languages too?

anonymouz• 14 years ago

I agree. Python is very popular for web development (server-side) as well as for GUI/CLI application development. It has attained "critical mass" a long time ago, and won't go anywhere anytime soon. Python has a number of strengths and weaknesses that make it suitable for many applications and not so suitable for many others. But that's ok, it doesn't need to be the one-and-only language to succeed.

icebraining• 14 years ago

That sounds like hell to a front-end developer. Its bad enough learning coffeescript or other dialects if a company uses them, but other languages too?

Isn't that like saying that having many server side languages is hell to server-side developers?

And isn't it making JavaScript effectively a jack of all trades? You might want to run code on the browser that is better expressed in a different language. After all, the days of client-side code being just a few value checks and DOM manipulation are beginning to disappear.

valdiorn• 14 years ago

Js is clearly doing A job at client side programming, because there is nothing else available.

I would so, so happily drop Javascript for just about ANYTHING else that works on IE+Chrome+Firefox+Safari.

IMO, Javascript is just awful, and I know I'm not alone with that opinion.

smoyer• 14 years ago

"Js is clearly doing A job at client side programming, because there is nothing else available."

So Java Applets are forgotten already ... and they had such grand plans! I for one won't miss them at all.

rom163842• 14 years ago

>IMO, Javascript is just awful, and I know I'm not alone with that opinion.

I had that opinion at first, but actually Javascript is a pretty good (and even pretty) language if you stick to the good parts [1]. Having the code automatically checked by JSHint helps a lot.

[1] "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford

Smerity• 14 years ago

That's the issue with this -- if this is actually a problem for Python, then it's a problem for EVERY programming language.

Let's first see what satisfies these problem areas:

Mobile = [ObjectiveC, Java, C (native client)] (and maybe Javascript+HTML if you look at the "compile down"/"webview" solutions)

Browsers = [Javascript] (and _maybe_ C if you say Emscripten is actually a sane solution to problems but I'd argue it fits only a minority of cases)

Games = [ObjectiveC (iPhone games), Java, Lua (scripting/plugins), Flash/ActionScript, C, C++]

No single language fits across all of these (dare I call them) niches. Every single language other than Javascript fails the "Browser" test.

I'd argue that focusing on many of these niches is the wrong way to go. Trying to fight for a spot on the mobile front will be a losing battle as Python will always be a second class citizen or flat out denied. The game development front seems like a confusing goal -- how many devs picked up Lua from the plugin system? Additionally, Python isn't fast enough to be the base nor faster than Lua for the plugin system.

The metric that he says he's optimising for is "adoption". I just feel like he's working backwards and optimising for tiny use cases instead of the general case. Many Java classes at university are being replaced with Python for example, and I'd say that's more important for adoption than any of these areas (other than web).

zanny• 14 years ago

Don't forget C# from Unity under games.

The take away here is that since client side web programming can only be javascript, it pigeonholes a large chunk of development effort into a forced language. I can't wait for the day web browsers can leverage multiple DOM aware scripting languages. The fact the JS JIT is already tightly coupled with an html / css parser is already bad enough.

zem• 14 years ago

> No single language fits across all of these (dare I call them) niches. Every single language other than Javascript fails the "Browser" test.

there are the compile-the-browser-component-to-javascript options like haxe and opa. haxe is even planning on compiling to mobile platforms.

hugh4life• 14 years ago

"Not sure if im being ignorant here but surely this is a problem for most server side languages? PHP, Ruby, Go, Perl would all suffer the same problems."

Python's main competition in the future will be Dart and ES.Next(the next version of JavaScript)... and maybe even Kotlin which has a JavaScript backend.

"Why are people obsessed about creating a "jack of all trades" language instead of letting languages do what they do best?"

Sometimes these languages do things better than the original languages that had their niche.

dagw2• 14 years ago

Python's main competition in the future will be Dart

Is there any indication that Dart developers want to move Dart outside of the web domain? Everything on their website is all about "HTML 5" and "web apps".

wwwtyro3• 14 years ago

'Why are people obsessed about creating a "jack of all trades" language instead of letting languages do what they do best?'

I can only speak for myself, but there is something extremely attractive about being able to do all of one project in a single language. A reduction in the overhead of context switches, perhaps? Fewer absent-minded semicolons in my python code? Correct me if I am wrong, but, isn't this a big part of the draw in Node.js?

rom163842• 14 years ago

I know what you mean. Coming from a Python background I first wrote Javascript in a Python-ish way. Now it's the other way around and I put semicolons at the end of the line, parentheses around logic clauses and use the wrong logic operators in my Python code. This because I work on both code bases simultaneously (Javascript on the client, Python on the server)...

bstpierre2• 14 years ago

Most of the projects I work on require the use of several languages, and to me it's nice to be able to use the sharpest tool for each job. In a given day I might use one or more of C, C++, Python, sh (which possibly includes bits of sed/awk/etc), and make. In the not-far-distant past I switched between C, perl, python multiple times during the workday. The context switches aren't too jarring -- a stronger statement would be that I think it's easier to context-switch and use appropriate tools than it is to dance around a general purpose tool. E.g. substitution in perl or sed versus any other language.

flyinRyan• 14 years ago

>Js is clearly doing a fine job at client side programming, should we not be happy with that?

I'm not happy with that. Lots of people want to say that the Web will one day replace native apps and this is precisely one of the reasons I hope that never happens: with a native App I can do the whole thing in one language. With the web I have to deal with HTML, CSS, <server side language > and Javascript for the client side. At the very least I'd like to be able to use <server side language> on the client as well. Why must we all be forced to use Javascript? It's not even a particularly nice language IMO.

>That sounds like hell to a front-end developer. Its bad enough learning coffeescript or other dialects if a company uses them, but other languages too?

What? Right now all languages either use a VM or they compile to assembly. Has that been so bad? If you read server side code you might be required to learn literally any language. Why should the client be different?

My hope is that someone will come out with a VM browser plug in that lets me write in any language I want, compile to to a binary that runs on that VM, and this plug in eventually replaces Javascript as the defacto web language.

Stop holding the browser client side programming environment hostage!

romaniv2• 14 years ago

That sounds like hell to a front-end developer. Its bad enough learning coffeescript or other dialects if a company uses them, but other languages too?

As a full stack web developer I have to know multiple languages and constantly learn new ones. Why should front-end be any different?

Ironically, one of the most common accusation I hear when someone speaks out against server-side JS is an accusation of not willing to learn new things. Double standards.

lutusp• 14 years ago

For myself, I'm worried about the future of writing -- you need a spell checker. An automated spell checker would have caught the majority of the misspellings in your article.

Terretta• 14 years ago

Spell check would be a good soltuion.

manuscreationis2• 14 years ago

And here I was hoping for some kind of thesis on the woeful state of affairs surrounding the fact they've had 2 major versions competing for developers attention, the with "older" fork being the more the widely supported one.

j2labs• 14 years ago

Every language deals with this until about x.3 of the newer version.

debacle2• 14 years ago

Not every language has such a broad chasm between two versions of the language. In fact, I can't really name one. Maybe ActionScript?

wladimir5• 14 years ago

I really think PyPy is the future of Python. A faster python with better support for paralellism by leveraging STM. This makes Python suitable to a lot of use-cases where it's currently too slow. What is lacking at this moment is compatibility with a lot of the libraries in the ecosystem (see https://bitbucket.org/pypy/compatibility/wiki/Home), due to limited C-API compatibility (which is non-trivial to say at least due to different memory management and locking semantics). This is serious because a big part of what makes Python so cool is the wide library support.

jayflux2• 14 years ago

I agree, PyPy is looking like the future of Python. Once it supports third party libraries or things change I believe python will be flying.

I for one am not worried.

dbaupp2• 14 years ago

Could you clarify what you mean by "third party libraries"? Do you mean libraries written in Python like those [which are pure Python] on http://pypi.python.org/pypi ?

ldng3• 14 years ago

Yet it only really address part of the problem. AFAIK, right now pypy is a memory ogre that would not fit on a mobile. If someone with Pypy knowledge would enlighten us about if it will ever be possible to run it on a 1 GB mobile phone or a tablet ?

wladimir5• 14 years ago

Right now memory usage is pretty bad. But mind that tablets and phones will have more and more memory in the future, while at the same time, very smart people are working at improving PyPy. I'm pretty optimistic in that regard.

After all: If it's possible to get JS JITs to fly on mobile devices, which it is, why not Python? I really see no structural problems.

k_bx2• 14 years ago

It's not faster. It's only faster for specific use-case, running the same stuff for long time in a loop. This use-case is a good fit for running webapps, but not small scripts, hooks, mobile or desktop apps that trigger some (relatively) small amount of (different) work randomly (on user's activity).

wladimir5• 14 years ago

To be fair, almost all longer running applications fall into the "same stuff for long time in a loop" category. Whether it's a GUI event loop, rendering, scientific computation, or a network server.

Sure, very small scripts and hooks only do one thing one time, but usually those aren't the things that benefit from being heavily optimized in the first place, and could just as well be left interpreted (even better -- as interpreted code is more compact and thus better fits in the cache). The same holds for every other JIT-based language.

tocomment• 14 years ago

He forgets about concurrency. That's a major point of weakness for the future of Python (even though no one will admit it).

lvh2• 14 years ago

Why is he forgetting about concurrency? There seem to be plenty of tools for managing concurrency right now in Python, and they are working fine for me.

What languages are you considering that have a better story here? Note that better story has to mean more than "syntax-level support" -- I run highly concurrent services in Python right now using Twisted without language level support, and it's not always obvious in which ways language level support would make things nicer in ways that aren't already implemented (e.g generators + @inlineCallbacks).

jedbrown3• 14 years ago

1. You might like gevent.

2. You can't parallelize computation if it's written in Python. (Yeah, yeah, concurrency is different from parallelism, but there is a lot of overlap.) Even if it's written in a different language, the granularity is constrained due to the GIL.

cmwelsh2• 14 years ago

Have you tried using PyPy and gevent? In a well-designed benchmark[1], it outperforms Node.js. That means it's at least competitive when it comes to concurrency... right? The GIL is not a big deal because shared state concurrency is a fundamentally broken model.

[1] http://mrjoes.github.com/2011/12/15/sockjs-bench.html

eyko• 14 years ago

I just hope that by well-designed benchmark, you don't mean tailored-to-fit.

jedbrown3• 14 years ago

The GIL is not a big deal because shared state concurrency is a fundamentally broken model.

This depends on the problem domain. A lot of the code I write is limited by memory bandwidth. The number of outstanding memory requests is limited by hardware, so saturating the memory bandwidth, especially when many active memory streams are needed, requires several cores to participate. A particularly useful approach now is for threads running on those cores sharing a particular cache level/prefetch unit to perform software "buddy prefetch" while working together on a traversal. The threads are weakly synchronized by memory dependencies, sharing both cache and bandwidth.

If you remove shared state, the threads each need their own ghost region and cannot share cache and bandwidth. I avoid shared state, especially shared mutable state, whenever possible, but there are still plenty of cases where it makes sense, especially at cache and NUMA domain granularity.

mh-• 14 years ago

Node.js is definitely not where I would set the bar for concurrency..

baq• 14 years ago

what are you talking about? everybody admits it but it's not an easy problem, otherwise it'd be solved by now. multiprocessing module helps a bit in scenarios where it makes sense to use multiple processes instead of threads for cpu-bound stuff; io-bound problems don't suffer from GIL that much.

RBerenguel• 14 years ago

Most of the problems look like Lisp problems 20 years ago. Maybe Python is not the best for mobile or for games, but... so what? It's great for some things, and if it excels in those, why does it need to be perfect for everything?

batista• 14 years ago

Because else you end like this Lisp of "20 years ago" ended up: used in some niches, largely forgotten in the main.

For languages, number of programmers translates to: higher quality and number of libs, better tested, more work on the efficiency, compiler, more companies built around the ecosystem, more tools, more books, more tutorials, more open source projects in and with it, more bugfixes, new APIs with support for the language, new bindings etc.

It doesn't have to be "perfect for everything", but it has to be good in the kind of things that interest the most people people now. Scientific computing ain't it.

Much better to use a bad language with 100,000 programmers than a good one with 1,000, as people reluctant of JS in the past have found out.

singold2• 14 years ago

I feel this is kind of what happens with php, it isn't the best language, but for someone new in server-side webdev there is plenty of info around the web to solve most problems

cmwelsh2• 14 years ago

Lua, a programming language I think might appeal to Pythonistas, is in a solid position to profit from the compile-to-JavaScript fad. I did some tests with mherkender's lua.js[1] a while back and Lua translated to JavaScript was only taking around 40% more time (I forget the exact numbers) to run the horrible benchmarks I wrote. There's still low hanging fruit to improve those numbers. Lua is a beautiful language. In addition, it's the language with the best chance at making it into a browser engine. It's lightweight - the compiled binary is around 120KB.

[1] https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js

JasonFruit2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure that Lua is going to appeal so strongly to Python programmers. It's wordy and its design makes opposite choices from Python's; vide global vs. local, for example. I think the brevity and safe assumptions of Python are a lot of what people value in it.

ufo• 14 years ago

Thats if you only focus on syntactic issues like that. If you see how the languages work they are actually much more similar (both have generators, operator overloading, lexical scope, etc...)

azakai• 14 years ago

> Lua [is] the language with the best chance at making it into a browser engine

For better or for worse, I think there is pretty much 0 chance of Lua or for that matter Python showing up natively in browsers. There are too many technical and political things in the way.

But we already have good tools for compiling both of those languages into JavaScript. If for example the Python community made JavaScript a priority to compile to, we could make it run very well and integrate nicely with the browser environment.

garbaaj• 14 years ago

"too many ..."

Not if you write your own browser.

rdtsc2• 14 years ago

Why not coffeescript then? It seems to be have good momentum behind it.

vxxzy• 14 years ago

There are some innovative ideas that may help "ease" over to python-on-mobile... One of them being pyBead: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pybead/?source=directory Another would be Muntjac...

dazzawazza2• 14 years ago

Regarding games: I chose lua over python because:

* smaller runtime foot print.

* faster runtime.

* simpler to embed

* the fewer batteries that are included are simpler to embed in your runtime. Python's libraries are often very tricky to embed.

I prefer python to lua, although they are both expressive and powerful languages, however the convenience of python isn't enough to trump the flexibility and speed of lua.

(edit formatting)

protomyth3• 14 years ago

There is also a lot more experience in the mobile space of using Lua than Python. That means a lot more blog posts and documentation.

dazzawazza2• 14 years ago

Ah yes, thanks for reminding me. This is also very important.

gte910h• 14 years ago

And corona is a pretty nice kit for iOS/Android and is fully supported.

http://www.coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/

bitcracker2• 14 years ago

I also like Lua. The speed of the virtual machine is awesome. But sadly Lua is still missing Unicode support. This is a big issue that needs to be solved.

threedaymonk• 14 years ago

> But sadly Lua is still missing Unicode support.

Whenever I hear someone complain about (lack of) Unicode support, my ears prick up. See, Unicode support is a many-headed beast, and almost no languages have very much of it, and most of what people naively think of as Unicode support (length, indexing into "characters", case conversion) doesn't really work when you take into account combining diacritics, ligatures, Turkish I, German S, etc.

I'm not especially familiar with Lua, but it transparently stores and compares UTF-8 strings, and there are even bindings for ICU. So what's missing from "Unicode support"? Script specifiers in regular expressions, perhaps? I'm asking out of genuine curiosity.

lloeki3• 14 years ago

> We see more major titles written in Flash and ActionScript than we see written in Python.

People want to write games in Python (myself included). They really do. The problem is, try to get pyopengl/pyglew/pygame/pyogre/pysdl or whatever running on your development machine. Now try to make it work on five different machines, across Windows/OSX/Linux. Then try to create a reliable distribution scheme for it.

I've tried it. Even the first step is painful, often requiring intimate knowledge of C, autoconf/make/whatever build systems and the system you're targeting, jus tto get you going. It's such a pain I just end up writing stuff in C, and only maybe plug in the python stuff later on, if at all.

Really, the lowest levels like PyOpenGL should have been part of the official Python distribution, just like tkinter, even if they are thin ctypes-like wrappers.

wwwtyro3• 14 years ago

I'd really like to see some responses to this, even if incomplete. Is there a way forward here? Even a hunch at a way forward?

takluyver• 14 years ago

I haven't tried it myself, but have you experimented with Panda3d? It's a game engine that supports code written in Python, but it has a much more coherent story for getting set up for development, and for distributing your game when you're done.

davedx• 14 years ago

Didn't the author mean using python as a scripting language for gameplay with a C game engine for the other stuff? Do you really need all those opengl / ogre / sdl whatevers; is it not possible to just have a python interpreter running in your game engine and only running vanilla Python code?

That's how we've done it before with LUA and other scripting languages in game dev. You don't expose anything low level to the gameplay scripting beyond simple primitives. You certainly don't touch anything to do with OpenGL - even the C++ game code rarely goes that deep.

nuje2• 14 years ago

> is it not possible to just have a python interpreter running in your game engine and only running vanilla Python code?

Sure, but it means much bigger swaths of C/C++ code and your game app is no longer a python program that imports some extension modules for performance critical tasks or third party lib bindings.

saucetenuto• 14 years ago

You can, but I've been told that integrating Python is a lot more involved than integrating Lua. People who've done it mostly seem to complain about (a) the relative complexity of Python's object model, and (b) how obnoxious it is to maintain reference counts efficiently.

I've done both, and neither seemed all that difficult, but then again our scripting requirements were pretty primitive.

devinj• 14 years ago

I can't speak for the rest, but pygame is trivial to get running on multiple systems, so I don't know what you're talking about in that regard.

I've heard pretty bad things about pyogre though.

mtinkerhess• 14 years ago

As a counter example, I once had a hard time getting pygame running on OS X. I don't remember exactly what the issue was, it may have had something to do with multiple versions of python installed on my machine, but it was enough of a pain that after a couple of hours trying to figure it out I decided I didn't care enough about checking out pygame to work it out. This might have been the kind of thing that someone more experienced in python would have known how to solve immediately, but for me at the time it was too much.

On the other hand, on other machines it was a breeze to set up.

sethish• 14 years ago

Really? Because I couldn't get the Ubuntu package or the one from pip to work. And the last article on HN that mentioned it has the author having to install it from a bundle on the pygame site, which is also what I ended up doing before moving on.

lloeki3• 14 years ago

pip install pygame fails here today, the same way it failed me a year or so ago.

from [0]:

    brew install sdl sdl_image sdl_mixer sdl_ttf smpeg portmidi 
    pip install hg+http://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame

which works, although installing from pygame's HEAD doe snot sound engaging. What's more, note the date and title.

Pyglet's master branch still uses Carbon, so you have to use a years-old experimental Cocoa branch, which won't be merged because it requires pyobjc[1]. This in turn requires pyobjc, which requires a little trickery to install:

    export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6    # else it'll fail at finding some libs, and stubbornly tries to stay in 32-bit land
    easy_install pyobjc-core==2.3    # else pyobjc fails to build this by itself
    easy_install pyobjc==2.3   # finally

[0] https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame/issue/82/homebrew-on-leo...

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/pyglet-u...

nuje2• 14 years ago

Yeah, the freely available Python libs may not seem polished enough. [edit: not that I have experience trying to ship multiplatform games with them] But: if you flip it around embedding Python in your C++ framework as a "scripting engine", it's pretty crappy too compared to a natively Python-driven system. And since most people aren't starting from scratch it's not so easy to configure the custom engine as a bunch of Python extensions either.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Oh goodness. This. I used to work with a friend on a port of a game to Python. PyGame installation was fine - but pygame also had horrendous performance! The library we ended up using was really, really difficult to set up for development.

We briefly had to make our own library for reasonable 2D performance.

manojlds• 14 years ago

Ironic that one of the things that got me hooked into programming and python was PyS60. I could write programs on my phone and run them. That was awesome. This was about 8 years ago on Nokia symbian phones.

eric_bullington• 14 years ago

Take a look at Kivy. Write code in Python and run it on Android and iOS. Building the dev environments for those platforms is still a pain, but once those are set it, it's a snap. Also, there's an online build server available for Android at no cost.

Main drawback is a slow first-time start-up time as the package files are unpacked. Subsequent start-ups are fine in my experience. Once a kivy program is started, it runs like a charm on modern hardware.

I'm building a scaffolding for productivity apps in Kivy here: https://github.com/esbullington/vite-vite

You can try out the (very alpha quality) Android app build with the scaffolding here: https://github.com/esbullington/vite-vite/vitevite-0.1-debug...

I should have some more time to work on this next week, at which point I'll be cleaning up the code, adding more documentation, and adding a few features. Suggestions and pull requests are welcome.

lmm• 14 years ago

We see some games written in Flash and ActionScript, but not AAA titles like Eve and Civ 4. How many general-purpose languages get used to write such titles? I can only think of C, C++... yep, that's it.

Is the author's point that we're moving away from "big" games and towards less complex, "casual" games like are popular on mobile, and the latter aren't using python?

hythloday• 14 years ago

Every game that uses Scaleform (that's a lot of them) uses Actionscript.

Here's a list of games--many of them AAA titles--using Lua: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua-scripted_video_gam...

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

Scaleform is just for the menus and stuff though isn't it? That's not quite the same as game logic.

pjmlp• 14 years ago

One should not focus in a single programming language, as such the article looks like a developer's cry to use his favorite language everywhere.

Just make use of the best tool for the job. In some cases that tool is not Python, as simple as that.

willvarfar2• 14 years ago

I want a Python environment running in Chrome NaCL.

79522• 14 years ago

Agreed! The constant focus on browser security means that this kind of thing is avoided out of hand even when security is not an issue (for internal deployments for example).

willvarfar2• 14 years ago

I blogged about that: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/14127327004/googl...

wilfra• 14 years ago

For web dev (not game dev) what is Python in danger of losing to? Rails?

nikcub• 14 years ago

IMO the largest competitor for new developers would be Node.js, and for existing developers would be Go

bti• 14 years ago

Haven't really been following Go at all. Are there any companies (besides Google) that are using Go on the web?

dmbaggett4• 14 years ago

My startup has built our entire system around Python and I have found it a lovely language to code in but a challenging language to deploy in practice, mainly for these reasons:

1) Python 3's backward incompatibility has made a mess of library support and has trapped us on Python 2.7.

2) memory usage is a problem on mobile for nontrivial Python programs; iOS isn't even a formally supported target.

3) Pythonic programs can't use multiple cores.

Now before you jump down my throat and tell me how bad a programmer I must be, etc, etc, let me provide some anticipatory clarifying comments:

1) Most libraries do now work in Python 3.3; we are waiting on gevent, pyasn1, and tlslite, and, of course, all our own stuff.

2) There's at least one fork of Python 3 on bitbucket with a bunch of promising memory-reducing changes (can't find it now).

3) Yes, I know about (multi)processing and that real threads are hard to work with.

Literally every few weeks we are confronted with a new problem caused by one of the above. The latest one: there is no WinRT port of Python yet, and the one Martin Loewis is working on is for Python 3.3. (Of course: Python 2.7 is barred from noncritical patches.) So we need to either make 2.7 work on WinRT or not ship a WinRT version. Windows 8 launches Oct 26; Python is frankly just not ready, and no one but Martin L and a few others seem to care (or even notice). (And yes, I know Win32 stuff still runs under Windows 8... but not on the ARM devices, and not in the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro.)

I wouldn't say I regret having chosen Python as the basis of a 250k-line system, because in retrospect it was still the best of the dynamic language choices. But I definitely feel like Python qua programming language has become a missed opportunity in many ways.

Nowadays if someone were to ask me what they should write a nontrivial new system in, I would probably recommend coding everything in JavaScript or C++11. This makes me sad, because Python's syntax and sensibility are unparalleled; I have never been as productive a coder as I have been coding in Python these last few years. And I've been coding in C dialects since, seriously, 1979 (on a Heathkit H89 with 64K of RAM!)

briancurtin2• 14 years ago

> Windows 8 launches Oct 26; Python is frankly just not ready, and no one but Martin L and a few others seem to care (or even notice).

Part of the problem is that you could count on one hand the number of contributors who have worked on non-trivial Windows issues in CPython in the last 12 months (probably even 24). I think we're pretty aware of this, but there are still only 24 hours in a day.

In fact, my new SSD should be arriving today to complete the build of my new machine, and Martin's work on WinRT probably jumps ahead on my todo list.

saurik10• 14 years ago

This lack of contributors would not have been as a serious problem without the insistence to break backwards compatibility and fork efforts for five (and counting) years: it sounds like the work got done, it is just for the "wrong version" (the one few people can use) of Python.

cdavid• 14 years ago

I don't think the main issue from OP is that WinRT support is not ready yet: windows 8 is not even out yet. The fact that he will have to migrate to python 3 to get there seems to be the main issue.

dmbaggett4• 14 years ago

Sweet! Thanks to both of you for your WinRT porting work. Agreed about the duration of the day. :)

dochtman2• 14 years ago

Yeah, I think the "no new features in 2.7.1+" has been making Python less exciting to use for the past few years, as libraries have slowly started to support Python 3. I think the future might feel less bleak once Python 3 becomes a better option in deployment.

As for the original article, I don't mind if Python's future isn't everywhere, but I find it sad that modern languages like Go and Rust don't copy more of Python's features (and my top contender for this is actually significant whitespace, because I find it greatly helps readability).

rbanffy• 14 years ago

> "no new features in 2.7" has been making Python less exciting

Erm... Not exactly. http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.7.html

"To help with porting to Python 3, several new features from the Python 3.x series have been included in 2.7"

HorizonXP3• 14 years ago

I would just like to make people aware that there is one mobile platform that does ship with Python support: BlackBerry 10 and the BlackBerry PlayBook.

It ships with Python 3.2 on device, and it can be used to develop actual apps with. Games are possible too, I know someone working on one right now.

You should check out our project's site at http://blackberry-py.microcode.ca/. I'm one of the lead contributors, and the project is still very much in its infancy.

I'm actually in San Jose right now for the BlackBerry Jam Americas conference if you'd like to meet up and discuss more.

phren0logy• 14 years ago

Tell the other two people there we said hi.

OK, that's mean, but seriously the installed base of BlackBerry doesn't really inspire confidence.

zokier3• 14 years ago

Symbian and Maemo/Meego also supported Python. I remember having Python interpreter on my 2005 vintage phone :)

TylerE2• 14 years ago

I realize this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I think that for the long term sake of the language, the 3.x schism was bad, and will ultimately be regarded as a big mistake.

In the time the community has spent dealing with/bickering about the transition, other languages have continued to forge ahead, while python just hasn't kept pace.

It hurts me to say that - I like python a lot, but lately it just doesn't seem to have it's mojo.

klibertp2• 14 years ago

But what other way there was? It's all about Unicode - it HAS to be resolved at some point, and if what I read is correct than there was no way to make this transition smooth(er). I'm not familiar witr Ruby at all, but I heard there was similar breakage between major versions lately?

gaius• 14 years ago

My friend, we are still a looooong way from the Perl 5/6 debacle! What language doesn't hit a few stumbling blocks?

agentultra• 14 years ago

You should avoid making technical decisions based on emotional impulses.

Technically Python 3 is superior, IMO, to Python 2.7 and barring any setbacks such as unported libraries (which are becoming increasingly scarce) I wouldn't start a new project in Python 2.7.

The reason libraries have been taking so long is because so many people are resistant to change that they hadn't begun making any serious efforts to port to Python 3 until 2011 by my estimation.

Python 2 is so ass-backwards and broken that I find it painful to use on large code bases. It conflates strings and byte streams, has pathetic Unicode support, and its libraries are rife with bit-rotting code. For the batteries to continue being useful they need to be updated once in a while. Have you seen urllib? It's atrocious by today's standards! Python needed an update and I think that the core team made the right choices.

The challenge has been porting and the core team knew that. They made some poor decisions in hind-sight such as 2to3 and dropping u"", but otherwise the porting story is not as painful as it seems. Cherrypy did it ages ago and Django is finally getting around to it. SQLAlchemy supports Python 3. There are fewer reasons not to switch than ever before and yet articles like this still come up to this day.

Python is only going to fall by the way-side if the developers of the language decide to stop using it. The language hasn't gotten worse by any stretch of the imagination. It needs more contributors to make it better. If you like it so much, port your libraries, contribute to python core, and stop complaining! It's been like five years people!

chubot• 14 years ago

Why do you even try to ship on Python 3? Python 2.7 is far from old. You don't have to use the latest of everything.

I've been using Python for almost 10 years, and mostly I've pretended that Python 3 doesn't exist so far :) That simplifies life in many ways.

I had no idea that people even ran Python on iOS, but if so it's cool that it even works!

It's not true that Pythonic programs can't use multiple cores. In many programs a lot of time is spent in C extensions (i.e. half the stdlib), where the GIL is released, so you can run in parallel fine in that case. Not to say you won't be bottlenecked, but don't write it off so quickly.

dmbaggett4• 14 years ago

Two reasons:

1) New ports (e.g., WinRT) are all going to be Python 3.X

2) All improvements (performance, memory size) are going in Python 3.X

Overall, Python 2.7 certainly works. But it's a wasting asset, and so is any codebase stuck on it.

ghettoCoder• 14 years ago

This is a good post and the comments are equally good. Here's the deal. Python nation isn't doing anything new here. Other languages have caused the same soul searching, think of C, Java or Delphi (of bad example). The point is that once a language grows up, and yes it can take takes ten years, it's a natural progression.

I've only been using Python for a few years and now I don't know how I managed to get anything done before. Python as a solid base and excels at certain things. Move on. Use the tool that fits.

As for the mobile hardware being low on power and battery life. Give it time. My computer 12 years ago had a difficult time doing anything when converting video. Now, I can play games while I convert a video and it uses less power/puts out less heat.

Patience.

b0rsuk• 14 years ago

I recognize that most of the response I'll probably get from this post amounts to, "You're complaining about silly things. Python doesn't do that, it isn't meant to. Stop putting a round peg in a square hole and complaining when it doesn't work."

If you agree with the above quote, you are committing a Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. We're not using Python for that, because the interpreter has a significant startup time, because Python performance is not stellar, etc. But it could be different.

I'm a novice programmer without commercial experience, but the statements in bold ring true to me: - Python is Expensive On Mobile - Python is Without a Door On Browsers - Python has Failed for Game Development

protomyth3• 14 years ago

I'm a little confused by the first point. How is Objective-C not a dynamic language? Is he talking about something other than dynamic dispatch? Is there some reason other than time that prevents an implementation of Python to mirror what was done with Objective-C?

scott_s3• 14 years ago

Python is interpreted, but Objective-C is compiled. That is, a Python program is executed through the Python interpreter, yet an Objective-C program runs natively.

Although he may indeed be confused about "dynamic," since dynamic dispatch has nothing to do with the above, and is supported by all OO languages.

protomyth3• 14 years ago

This is where I'm really not clear. What makes Python harder to compile than Smalltalk (which had some native compilers - Smalltalk/X) or Objective-C?

argv_empty• 14 years ago

Python is interpreted, but Objective-C is compiled.

There are plenty of lisp compilers out there, but people still consider lisp a dynamic language.

randomdata2• 14 years ago

Compilation does not necessarily need to remove the dynamism. Objective-C is generally considered a dynamic language, though I get the feeling that many think it is just another C++ with different syntax, which muddies the waters, so to speak.

A quote from Apple themselves:

"Compared to other object-oriented languages based on C, Objective-C is very dynamic. The compiler preserves a great deal of information about the objects themselves for use at runtime. Decisions that otherwise might be made at compile time can be postponed until the program is running. Dynamism gives Objective-C programs unusual flexibility and power."

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...

ippisl• 14 years ago

Shedskin might be one solution. From the shedskin forum[1]: " I've built and run shedskin apps for the iPhone - it works great actually.

It required commenting a few things out, and swapping in the boehm gc for iOS port.

Of course, no native ui widgets available - but I used phonegap to do the ui in html5 and it called shedskin c++ for all the actual app logic. Phonegap supports connecting html5 -> native c++ via a plugin architecture. Works wonderfully.

High powered, efficient apps on the iPhone via python is a bit of paradise compared to apples own obj-c, I must say. Huge potential for shedskin adoption there if someone packaged things up this way for the general public..."

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/shedskin-discuss/browse_threa...

skrebbel2• 14 years ago

This is like writing an article in 2003 saying "I'm worried about the future of PHP". Even if you're right and Python is doomed, so what? You'll have another good reason to broaden your resume and become a generalist engineer.

Tloewald• 14 years ago

In 2003 PHP was already the most popular web dev language and web dev was where the action was and the transition to PHP4 from PHP3 was pretty smooth. This article points out that he's got code stuck on Python 2.x, Python is not doing well on the current hotmess (mobile) and it's not now and never has been as popular as PHP. How is this similar?

skrebbel2• 14 years ago

You're taking things too literally. I took PHP as a language that was very popular for web apps in the past, and much less so nowadays. PHP's popularity for the web in 2003 is not dissimilar to Python's popularity for the web in 2012.

Anyone predicting in 2003 that PHP would become less popular and/or suitable for the web would've turned out to be right. Yet, I bet anybody who might've made such a prediction just learned a new language (maybe even Python) and is still enjoying creating great software just like back then.

nacker2• 14 years ago

There is a Door on Browsers for Python right here:

http://pyjs.org/examples/

https://github.com/pyjs/pyjs/wiki/GettingStarted

Needs more developers... (Hint)

nacker2• 14 years ago

In spite of the Elop shenanigans at Nokia, Qt is very healthy, and Qt5 has even been demoed on the Raspberry Pi. Pyside is now totally integrated and mature. Please take a look.

http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide-Tutorials-by-Experience-Le...

http://doc.qt.digia.com/4.7-snapshot/gettingstartedqml.html

http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide-and-QML-Playground

mpdehaan2• 14 years ago

So I can't say I'm worried much.

Python strikes a very good balance between rapid development prototyping and something that is sustainable, and has an excellent level of readability that makes it outstanding for gathering patches from even non-professional programmers.

Most of the interesting parts of computing now cluster around web applications and web services, where the action happens on the server and Python is still reasonably well suited -- and in the servers behind them, where it's quite critical in Linux distributions. I write a ton of software for systems administrators and can't really see using anything else if I wanted the same contributor rate.

Sure, it doesn't run in the browser, but I can't see myself pining for the return of Java applets either. It all comes down to what types of applications you are writing.

If I was doing HFT, I'd clearly want something statically typed, fast, and functional. Those same properties are things I don't want in other applications. It's pretty much a screwdriver vs carburetor type of problem.

Yes, I'd love to see more investment in the runtime -- but I'm also reasonably fine with where it's at.

pcote• 14 years ago

Python does not typically end up in a video game's main code base. However, to say it failed is to have a pretty limited view of game development. Art asset creation often requires customized tools within software packages like Blender or Maya. Python is doing just fine within it's part of the development pipeline.

ehutch792• 14 years ago

So, what should we be using instead NOW? It's sort of frustrating reading these types of articles. I mean should I not be using python for my web apps anymore? Since we shouldn't be using python anymore, what should i use in the mean time? no suggestion? guess i'll sit here twiddling my thumbs until the next big thing hits hacker news.

modernerd• 14 years ago

As a PHP developer slithering away from PHP at great speed on the back of Python, I am excited about its future.

Yes, I would love to be able to use Python for games and mobile development too, but I do not expect to be able to use it for these things, just as I do not expect to be able to build web apps with Objective-C (even though some do).

For me, the power, elegance, philosophy, and community that sustain Python are enough to make it a worthwhile choice in a finite but important number of domains.

bduerst• 14 years ago

Same. I cut my teeth on PHP but have recently started working in Python and like it.

PHP is nice because you can throw it on any LAMP stack and it's interpreted, but Python runs much smoother for heavy data lifting.

kamaal2• 14 years ago

Don't worry about the future of a tool. They just come and go. As a developer worry about the problems, quality problems you would like to solve. Think about 'whats in it for you'.

The inevitable nature of changing requirements in programming mean, there is always going to be demands for new changes and new features in a programming language. Changes in Syntax and excess syntactical sugar many times come only at the expense of breaking backwards compatibility. What you are seeing now is a saturation with Python. Python is good, but people now want more. I bet you unless Python is ready for major backwards incompatible changes in another 5-6 years they are going to lose this battle against other languages. NodeJS, Go they are all going to eat Python's lunch. What you will see now is cool stuff getting built in some language like Go and will go viral every 15 days. People who had originally no interest will learn just because its getting famous. Architects who just want to sound different and distinct will use it, Slowly but sooner or later there will be job demands for Go. This is inevitable and going to happen. Suddenly people will find every reason under the sun to hate python and love go.

Python will increasingly find itself in the same situation Perl was some years back. And its fans will have to face the same trolling.

Its just your usual technology cycles. By the way I guess its time to start learning Go.

TwoBit• 14 years ago

I never took Python very seriously because of its shitty documentation.

LBarret• 14 years ago

I also built my first startup in python. It was a technical success (and a financial failure) but using it imply a few things :

* good coders. ( bad coders can do much more damage. )

* you need to use cython (and maybe numpy).

* memory profiling is hard

* you need to search pypi alot, there is likely something there to help you.

* windows builds of extensions can be tricky.

I am also concerned about its future, the community seems in a "I know better than you" attitude and I don't see anything major coming, except pypy.

vorg2• 14 years ago

The article didn't mention Python's availability in China. Their website download page (http://www.python.org/download) has been blocked by the Firewall since late 2009.

olivier1664• 14 years ago

After loking for an explanation:

"http://www.python.org/ftp could bypass GFW to download it. Because of version 2.6.4, the sensitive number 'June 4' to government, so the GFW block the download page."

according to wpopenid on http://posted-stuff.blogspot.hk/2010/07/downloading-python-f...

vorg2• 14 years ago

Thanks, that "June 4" reference could be the reason, but I'd think too many webpages would be blocked if it were. (Of course, I had to look at the .in version of that blogspot page as HK's version, like many others, is blocked in the mainland.)

The FTP site works for me. I visit Hong Kong often enough so not having access to the latest internet stuff isn't usually a problem for very long.

yason• 14 years ago

This is just an old rant that has been heard before from many language people, Lisp community included, and the author seems to know it but also refuses to get along with that and is upset because that square peg really, really can't be banged into a round hole.

Python has been in decline for years, maybe 5-6 years now. Python3 definitely cemented a lot the current downward angle. Python isn't out and possibly never will be, but its design has gradually shifted away from the hacker community. And that means the momentum will consequently shift into other languages and environments. And that's fine. Each language will gather the following it deserves, in the ever-changing environment.

nandoflorestan• 14 years ago

Hmm. I still see many people griping about Python 3 incompatibility, so here is my comment.

If you have some code that you would like to have working under Python 3, check out a little library called "six". With it, it is simple to maintain a single codebase that works with both Python versions (no translations necessary, forget the 2to3 tool).

For example, the Pyramid web framework (and many related libraries) have been successfully using this approach. This way one can support Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.2+.

Together with "from future" imports (for Python 2.6 and 2.7), this is easy to understand, though "upgrading" the code may still take time.

At the top of every module of mine I have this:

from __future__ import (absolute_import, division, print_function, unicode_literals)

just_testing• 14 years ago

Link to syx library: http://packages.python.org/six/

I Am Worried About The Future Of Python

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