[spenrose]

I forgot two, er, three:

9. Python got lucky that its inevitable screwups (Python3) didn’t quite kill it.

10. Swift and Kotlin both define programming as serving the compiler (specifically LLVM) rather than serving the coder’s problem. (I haven’t discussed Rust so far since it isn’t attempting to compete with 98% of Python use cases, but if you squint you can see it as going one step further than Swift and Kotlin and in effect forcing the coder to be a sort of human compiler who thinks in types and memory management. This is not a criticism of Rust, BTW.)

0. And behind all of this is Moore’s Law and the demographic explosion of programmers. Python was an implicit, perhaps unconscious bet that if you served people thoughtfully, the tradeoffs with serving the needs of contemporary silicon wouldn’t matter as much.

[spenrose]

I can't stop thinking about this. WRT Perl specifically, it’s fascinating how the two competitors adopted Unix shell patterns. Python is handicapped to this day by not automagically snarfing up environment variables, etc. But Perl leaned hard into TECO-style gibberish and the meta-syntax that is regular expressions, confronting beginners with arbitrary complexity. It feels like Wall embraced the system administrator side of coding — the side that has an enormous capacity for tracking corner cases and managing impedance mismatches. Wall was trained, perhaps not coincidentally, as a linguist, a field where continent facts really matter. Guido, on the other hand, was an accomplished mathematician. (This is the Dwarf / Elf distinction from Cryptonomicon.)

[eesmith]

Guido van Rossum was not an accomplished mathematician. He has a master's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, and got a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, but the former is because that's where CS was taught, and the latter because he was a smart high school student.

As he described it:

"But after that first year [of college], it turned out that the real math I wasn’t particularly good at. And I think there were some great teachers at that university and some super cool topics being taught. And I couldn’t keep up. I remember something about a particular form of group theory. And I knew—and a few other students who were like, “Oh, you’ve got to go do graph theory, or group theory.” And I was like—it went way too fast. And I suddenly realized I didn’t have the skills to keep up with those topics. But in the meantime, starting almost from my first month I entered the math department, I had been learning to program because they had I think one of the first-year undergraduate courses was programming in Pascal."

Quoting from 'Oral History of Guido van Rossum', https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273871...

[spenrose]

Thank you for the correction. I should have said “trained”.

[eesmith]

I believe that "trained" is also not the correct characterization.

He got his degree in CS at a time when CS at the University of Amsterdam was part of the math department. He also took CS classes at Vrije Universiteit, under an arrangement where students could attend courses at either school.

He didn't study group or graph theory and was not interested in mathematics. Instead, he took computer classes:

> the programming classes I got at University of Amsterdam in the math department, were a pretty haphazard collection of topics that didn’t interest me. I mean, sometimes the topics interested me. I mean I remember one semester we were all learning ALGOL 68. And the teacher was super excited, but other times, it was like numerical programming, calculating what the error is after a certain set of matrix operations. And I was not interested in anything involving floating-point numbers, basically. But Tanenbaum, or his group [at Vrije Universiteit], taught topics like operating systems, databases, networks, and languages, I believe. Yeah, Tanenbaum himself did a class where he taught like seven non-mainstream programming languages. And that was all I just soaked that up.

The math department had to "customize" his degree "a little bit for [his] situation."

There is no indication of being a trained mathematician, neither as someone trained to do mathematical research, nor trained to apply mathematics to other problems.

I have an undergrad degree in math, having taken the course for both pure and applied tracks, and even when I was fresh out of college I wouldn't say I was trained to be a mathematician.

[qcnguy]

Kotlin didn't target LLVM at all when it was designed, that feature came much later. The primary target for Kotlin is and always was the JVM. And Kotlin was designed with usability in mind from day one, that was the justification for it. Weird to say Kotlin define programming as serving the compiler. The compiler bends over backwards to serve the user.

[spenrose]

Thank you for the correction

[bb88]

Rust isn't so much "competing" as it is "complimentary" to python. This is very much how python was billed originally as a scripting language for "C" in it's early days.

The slow parts of your python program can be rewritten in rust or C, your choice. So refreshing.

[ethbr1]

To me, this was one of the greatest strengths of early Python: humility.

It didn't try to be everything (high performing, compile-time static typing) to everyone (novice, intermediate, expert, academic).

It instead made it easy to solve critical needs (e.g. highest performance hot code) by interoperating with an existing solution that did them well.