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Python was already in the top 5 well before the whole AI craze and before pandas was out. Python has a huge amount of introductory learning material that assumes it is your first language, while most FP languages (Ex: Clojure, Haskell, F#, Scala, OCaml) really struggle in this area. I really like FP, but there is a bit of a steep plateau when learning. If you look at some of the questions people ask in the Python stack exchange, you get the impression that millions are learning it as the defacto first language (I was one of those nearly a decade ago). I try to find similar paths to FP and everything from the tooling to lack of thorough introductory material keeps killing it for me. Another issue is that from a pedagogy perspective all the "building blocks" in FP are different to what many people already know. If you're used to the imperative/OO paradigm you can move between languages by just learning the syntax to (lists, dictionaries, while and for loops, branching, array access, file IO, and classes). When learning FP you have to learn similar, but different concepts (pattern matching, monads, currying, discriminated unions...etc). The beginner books that do exist (ex: learn you a Haskell) are nice, but I've talked to many (myself included) that when they finish say "I still have no clue how to program in Haskell". To give another example, I spent two weeks reading a Python book on building text games and when I was finished I was like "OMG I can do stuff". That book covered how all the main data structures could be used with short and fun programs. It also included reading text files, string operations, pickling data, classes, modules..use of the included IDLE IDE. It was great. |
I don't know how long ago have you tried Clojure, but it is a lot easier to start with than Haskell or Scala. There are now more than a dozen of books available (for the beginner and for the advanced levels). Clojure is much better than Python - it has extremely nice, consistent standard library; It has "true" REPL - with it you can evaluate almost any chunk of your code with no preliminary ritual, even much praised Jupyter doesn't feel as nice; Clojure not statically typed but it has Spec, which is totally awesome - the way how you can derive property based tests is almost mind-blowing; Clojure's stability is almost legendary; It makes concurrency simple; It makes dealing with dependencies less painful; It can seamlessly run on both: front-end and back-end, having live-updates in your browser and REPL connected to it feels like magic. Honestly, transforming data using Clojure is a pure joy.