[sn_master]

I can't find a single good argument for Python based on merit that's not at least 15+ years dated and stems from "But Google is using it".

It's not the easiest syntax, not the best compiler support, performance and threading is a joke. The entire language is based on hype back from the time when the only two mainstream languages were C++ and Java.

[laichzeit0]

It’s not like there’s a gun to anyone’s head forcing them to use Python. The ecosystem (library, framework, IDEs) is what draws people to use it.

If there was a superior alternative that covers the breadth of the Python ecosystem I’m pretty sure no one would have any scruples in using it. A programming language and its syntax is the least interesting or complex part when it comes to solving problems. Just rattling off some amazing libraries I've used over the last few years:

https://scikit-image.org - Image processing

https://imgaug.readthedocs.io - Image augmentation

https://scikit-learn.org/stable - ML

https://pymoo.org - Multi objective optimization

https://simpy.readthedocs.io/ - Discrete event simulation

https://lifelines.readthedocs.io - Survival analysis

https://bambinos.github.io/bambi - Bayesian modeling

https://unit8co.github.io/darts/ - Time series forecasting

https://abydos.readthedocs.io/en/latest/abydos.distance.html - Basically any string distance metric you can think of

The list just goes on and on.. oh yeah, some Deep Learning libraries too, which some people find useful.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

>It’s not like there’s a gun to anyone’s head forcing them to use Python. The ecosystem (library, framework, IDEs) is what draws people to use it

Sure, but that is the gun, especially (as reflected in your examples) for machine learning. The best frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) are all Python, with support for other languages being an afterthought as best.

The use of scripting languages (Python, Lua - original Torch) for ML seems to have started partly because he original users were non-developers, more from a math/stats background, and partly because an interactive REPL loop is good for a field like this that is very experimental/empirical.

Does it make sense that we're now building AGI using a scripting language? Not really, but that's where we are!

[alanfranz]

Python is the 2nd best language for everything.

It doesn’t excel at anything, but anything a software can do, it can be done in Python somehow.

So, a great pick when you’ve got no idea where you’re going to, when you’re prototyping, when you don’t care about performance or perfection.

I agree that for large scale systems when you already know what you’re doing, Python shows its limits quite soon (and we should add the problems with missing/slow type checking that slows down large scale systems development).

[smallerfish]

To steal from another thread, Python is the McDonald's of languages - it's ubiquitous, it doesn't take much effort, and it's really not very good.

The trope about it being the 2nd best language for everything isn't correct. It's taught in universities because it has a very short time to gratification, and the basic syntax is quite intuitive. Academics latched onto it for ML because of some excellent libraries, and it became established as a vital part of the ecosystem from there.

But it's a nightmare to support a moderate to large codebase in production, packaging continues to be a mess, and it's full of weird quirks. Great for weekend projects, but for pete's sake take a minute and port them into something more reliable before going to production with them.

[alanfranz]

I think you’re focusing too much on the letter, rather than the idea.

[pharmakom]

> Python is the 2nd best language for everything.

Huh? Why?

You can barely deploy it to Web.

it doesn't scale perfoance wise

you can't built robust abstractions

The REPL is merely OK

You can barely ship working code without containers

the syntax is hard to manipulate programmatically

Python has inertia but it's holding us back

[l33tman]

Well for starters, web deployment isn't "everything". Python is the de-facto go-to language for research or general prototyping, where not everyone is a programming wiz keeping track of the latest trendy new compiled language. Not everyone can compile stuff even.. :)

Having said that, I've deployed two large Django projects on the web with tons of customers and it runs and scales just fine, and it's a DREAM to maintain and develop for than for example Java.. I would go so far as to say the opposite, if you haven't used Python for web deployment you've been missing out! (you lose some efficiency I'm sure but you gain other things)

[pharmakom]

I was talking about running in the Web browser. it's not everything, but it's an important part of everything in my book.

[sireat]

https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide is pretty amazing for running Python client side in the browser.

You could run notebooks entirely client side https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

The startup is slow but otherwise it is pretty functional.

[renox]

You have good points but "the syntax is hard to manipulate programmatically"??

Maybe you haven't noticed but Lisp is now a tiny niche and most new languages aren't homoiconic either..

[pharmakom]

I don't think that proves anything. If we had "JavaLisp" in the browser instead of JavaScript then Lisp would be very popular. Besides that, Python is harder to manipulate than many non-Lisps, such as JavaScript and Go.

[renox]

Python became popular without being the 'web language', the Lisps didn't.

[pharmakom]

Curly brace languages are more popular again.

[kazinator]

Here, we can set Lisp aside and take grandparent comment's definition of syntax to be concrete, character-level syntax.

Python concrete syntax is harder to manipulate programmatically compared to Javascript concrete syntax.

For instance, to insert one statement into another, we need to traverse the lines of that syntax and add the right amount of indentation. We can't just plant the syntax into the desired spot and be done with it.

[alanfranz]

What is another language working that well in a larger number of areas?

[pharmakom]

Clojure

JavaScript

Typescript

OCaml

Haskell

F#

[alanfranz]

Any JVM language or .NET language will take more to interface with native libraries, it’s not the same.

Ocaml is very niche, I feel it’s an hard sell for a general purpose language. Haskell, 3x that.

JS and TS, could be. But are they so much better than Python, if better at all?

[revelio]

Native library interfacing isn't really Python's strong suit, interpreter plugins are quite painful to write.

.NET has P/Invoke which is much nicer.

JVM is getting Panama+jextract, which is the nicest yet. You can go straight from header files to pure Java bindings which don't need any extra native code at all. But it's not shipped yet :(

[nequo]

> Ocaml is very niche, I feel it’s an hard sell for a general purpose language. Haskell, 3x that.

The impression about Haskell’s nicheness compared with OCaml prevails. But Haskell has a larger userbase and a larger library ecosystem than OCaml.

[xxpor]

Outside of typescript, this feels like a response from a decade ago, when Python was still mired in the 2 vs 3 problem.

What's happened to the popularity of all of these languages since 2010? Outside of JS/TS, absolutely nothing. If anything, they've lost mindshare.

[chpatrick]

I've been using Haskell professionally for 8 years and its ecosystem is laughable compared to Python.

[sigi64]

Python, the language with global interpret lock, Is not the 2nd best language for everything, especially in the age od multicore processors.

[baq]

Python is the practical language for when you do your cpu intensive tasks outside of it as a feature, since the GIL isn’t a problem with io parallelism.

You’d do better complaining about still nascent, compared to alternatives, async support or lack of jit in the official implementation.

[elbear]

It's not the easiest syntax?

It's the easiest among most popular languages. It uses the least amount of symbols, parenthesis and braces only for values.

Some people don't like the significant whitespace, but that helps readability.

[kgwgk]

> Some people don't like the significant whitespace, but that helps readability.

Compared to what? Unindented or badly indented code in other languages?

In other languages you can move code around and it still works - and nobody prevents you from adding whitespace for readeability (it may be even done automatically for you).

[pharmakom]

> It uses the least amount of symbols, parenthesis and braces only for values.

is there any evidence that this makes it easier?

people learn python as beginners because it has a reputation for being easy for beginners

I don't see anything about the syntax that makes it inherently easier

[hasmanean]

And what symbols it has, it reuses them wisely.

The square brackets alone make it a winner. Array, list and strings indexing. Dictionary lookups. Slices and substrings. List comprehensions. The notations convenience of this alone is immense.

Built in list, string, and dicts. For the 90% of code that is not performance critical, this is a godsend. Just looking at the c++ syntax for this makes me never want to use a stl data structure for anything trivial.

[whynotminot]

What languages are you comparing it against?

Python is more readable than C. Way better than C++. Far simpler to reason about than Java. Maybe Typescript is on a similar level, but throwing a beginner into the JS ecosystem can be daunting. Perhaps Ruby could be argued as equally simple, but it feels like that's a dead end language these days. Golang is great, but probably not as easy to get rolling with as Python.

What else? Are you going to recommend some niche language no one hires for?

[vkou]

> Far simpler to reason about than Java.

Strong disagreement. Explicit types make reasoning about Java much easier, especially when you are in an unfamiliar codebase.

Python is not quite the 'write-only' language of Perl, but it is a lot easier to write it than it is to read it.

[baq]

Python is getting typescript like typing support. Slowly, yes, but way better than Java’s type system.

[MattPalmer1086]

Anecdata, but I learned Python many years ago precisely because I found the syntax was clear.

I liked the one way of doing most things philosophy, coming off working on a large C++ code base.

[pharmakom]

Being more clean than C++ doesn't prove much :)

[MattPalmer1086]

Very true!

At the time I evaluated other languages to learn, narrowed it down to Ruby and Python, and picked Python as I felt it had a nicer syntax than Ruby. And the "one way to do things" philosophy. This was back in 2005 or so.

What other languages of that period would you say had a nicer syntax than Python?

[Swizec]

Python has the ecosystem. That’s it. The lingua franca of data science. At this point it doesn’t even matter anymore why.

Just like you’re not gonna usurp JavaScript on the web.

[codexon]

There were plenty of other languages competing with python for the same niche such as perl, ruby, js, php etc... Python is superior to all of those just for syntax alone, it is easier and cleaner to both read and write.

[eru]

That might be true, but it seems to generally fall under the category of 'relevant 15+ years ago', doesn't it?

[rybar]

How do you qualify relevancy? Your own personal bubble and bias? Adoption and usage?

Pull requests and stars on github? That might be a start.

https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2022/4 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/stars/2022/4

Though you may say but but alltheprivaterepos! Then I challenge you to back up what you mean by relevance and prove python is a category of relevant 15+ years ago.

[codexon]

I'm arguing against the point that it clearly did have the easiest syntax compared to the competition back then and not because Google was using it.

Even if it doesn't have the best syntax now (which I doubt), the tooling and libraries make it a better choice over any language that have an edge over python syntax.

[eru]

> I'm arguing against the point that it clearly did have the easiest syntax compared to the competition back then and not because Google was using it.

Maybe, not sure? My point was that both the syntax and Google using it was more relevant 15 years ago than now.

(I don't have much of an opinion on the 15+ years ago thing.)

[codexon]

I don't see any reason for it to be less true now.

Is python syntax worse than any brand new languages like rust or go? Absolutely not. It's still better.

Did Google stop using it? I don't think so, but I also don't think people picked it just because Google did.

[eru]

Python's syntax is ok.

Btw, I wish they would take some inspiration from Haskell's syntax.

Haskell also has significant whitespace, but its defined as syntactic sugar for a more traditionally syntax with curly braces and semicolons.

Approximately no-one uses that curly-brace syntax, but it's good for two things:

- silences the naysayers

- more importantly: allows you to copy-paste code even into forms that mess up your indentation.

[ElFitz]

> Python is superior to all of those just for syntax alone, it is easier and cleaner to both read and write.

Do you have any argument to support this, aside from personal bias?

[codexon]

I can make some arguments but it all boils down to personal bias and anecdotes.

The forced use of spacing to delineate blocks means you will never see a bunch of brackets eating up screen space and the common error where someone adds another line to an if statement but doesn't add braces.

Semicolons not being conventional means less screen noise and less code golf 1 liners.

The focus on imperative vs functional means you rarely ever see something like this a(b(c(d(e(f(g))))

PHP suffers greatly from poorly named standard functions on top of all of that.

Don't get me started on Ruby metaprogramming.

These are just the things I could think of off the top of my head. I do not want to spend my afternoon on this. This is just my experience looking at code for over 20 years, you either believe it or you don't. There's no scientific studies to prove that 1 syntax feature is superior.

I highly doubt that everyone chose python just because Google did. Python was a giant step in syntax compared to the competition back then, and now even if there is a new language out there right now that has a better syntax, it's not going to be better by much, and it is not going to have the tooling, libraries, or the community.

[ElFitz]

Having not been around when Python gained in popularity, and having mostly been using Node.js and Swift, this is actually quite interesting.

Thanks!

[eru]

Couldn't you level the same argument against eg C++?

[6510]

Before an NDA send him to Rura Penthe I use to have an internet friend pedantic about seemingly useless compilers and interpreters. Quests like: use obscure language A to translate obscure language B to obscure language C. Then use B compiled to C to interpret D.

A long story short, in the future the AI can just convert all our code to FORTH or HolyC or some "creative" combination of languages chosen by prophecy (read: hallucination) perhaps even Python — as a show of strength.