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Python used to be my go to language. For me it was clear, easy to read, had a lot of great packages. Trying ideas out in the REPL was handy. (I've since mostly

Python used to be my go to language. For me it was clear, easy to read, had a lot of great packages. Trying ideas out in the REPL was handy. (I've since mostly abandoned it for golang, and wonder how any of my Python ever worked considering how many silly mistakes the compiler catches).

cookiecaper 9y ago
Yeah, both Golang and Swift are direct descendants of Python, and it's sort of hard to justify a niche for Python now that Google and Apple have performant in-house versions. I have to wonder if Go and Swift would've just been Python if Guido had put more attention on the Python VM (and been willing to make some compromises to accommodate improvements). Now Python is stuck playing catch up. Discussion around removing the GIL is finally beginning to be taken seriously instead of considered hypothetical, optional type annotations are being added, etc., but it may be too little too late.
- wayn3 9y ago
  if python is the language of ML and ML is the future, i dont think the snakes are going extinct.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    1. There's no reason that Python has to be "the language of ML", especially not with so many new Python-inspired languages, like Go. ML is a performance-sensitive sector. Python's strong/established C FFI is its selling point here, since Python gives such nice icing on the cake buried in a C module like NumPy, but this will only matter as long as the newer languages are not fast enough for the performance-sensitive bits. Once native Go is fast enough, it seems logical that everything will move to Go instead of C+Python. 2. "ML is the future" is vague and meaningless. ML is certainly not the future for many things, and it's certainly being misapplied on many other things in the cargo-cult belief that ML must be used everywhere.
    - memracom 9y ago
      Actually there are several reasons that Python has to be the language of Machine Learning and Data Science. It begins with two decades of being promoted as the most accessible language for scientists to get the job done. Then the widespread use of Python led to an explosion of libraries creating a rich ecosystem. Nowadays there are sophisticated tools like Orange3 and Jupyter (not to mention Beaker Notebook) that make it easy to share code within teams of scientists. None of this is going away and even R users are discovering that it is easier to use R for the stats part of the problem and integrate with Python for everything else. R used to have the best presentation graphics but now Python has caught up with improved Matplotlib and Bokeh. Also some people prefer to use d3.js in the browser moving from just presenting their data to enable exploration of it. In the ML/DS area, CPUs will never be fast enought with Go. You need to exploit the GPU which Python has good support for, or move to distributed computing which Python also does well. No other language will dislodge Python. Instead we are making integration more prominent and using multiple languages working together. Beaker Notebook is particularly good at this and is driving Jupyter in that direction too.
    - wayn3 9y ago
      there is no reason that python has to be the language of ML. there is no reason that english has to be the language that is spoken when foreigners interact with each other. but somehow, it is. and it doesnt really change.

cookiecaper 9y ago

Yeah, both Golang and Swift are direct descendants of Python, and it's sort of hard to justify a niche for Python now that Google and Apple have performant in-house versions. I have to wonder if Go and Swift would've just been Python if Guido had put more attention on the Python VM (and been willing to make some compromises to accommodate improvements). Now Python is stuck playing catch up. Discussion around removing the GIL is finally beginning to be taken seriously instead of considered hypothetical, optional type annotations are being added, etc., but it may be too little too late.

wayn3 9y ago
if python is the language of ML and ML is the future, i dont think the snakes are going extinct.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  1. There's no reason that Python has to be "the language of ML", especially not with so many new Python-inspired languages, like Go. ML is a performance-sensitive sector. Python's strong/established C FFI is its selling point here, since Python gives such nice icing on the cake buried in a C module like NumPy, but this will only matter as long as the newer languages are not fast enough for the performance-sensitive bits. Once native Go is fast enough, it seems logical that everything will move to Go instead of C+Python. 2. "ML is the future" is vague and meaningless. ML is certainly not the future for many things, and it's certainly being misapplied on many other things in the cargo-cult belief that ML must be used everywhere.
  - memracom 9y ago
    Actually there are several reasons that Python has to be the language of Machine Learning and Data Science. It begins with two decades of being promoted as the most accessible language for scientists to get the job done. Then the widespread use of Python led to an explosion of libraries creating a rich ecosystem. Nowadays there are sophisticated tools like Orange3 and Jupyter (not to mention Beaker Notebook) that make it easy to share code within teams of scientists. None of this is going away and even R users are discovering that it is easier to use R for the stats part of the problem and integrate with Python for everything else. R used to have the best presentation graphics but now Python has caught up with improved Matplotlib and Bokeh. Also some people prefer to use d3.js in the browser moving from just presenting their data to enable exploration of it. In the ML/DS area, CPUs will never be fast enought with Go. You need to exploit the GPU which Python has good support for, or move to distributed computing which Python also does well. No other language will dislodge Python. Instead we are making integration more prominent and using multiple languages working together. Beaker Notebook is particularly good at this and is driving Jupyter in that direction too.
  - wayn3 9y ago
    there is no reason that python has to be the language of ML. there is no reason that english has to be the language that is spoken when foreigners interact with each other. but somehow, it is. and it doesnt really change.