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TL;DR: Slightly interesting but narrowly focused article with clickbait-ish headline. It charts the growth of Stack Overflow python question views in the last f

by jzl 9y ago

TL;DR: Slightly interesting but narrowly focused article with clickbait-ish headline. It charts the growth of Stack Overflow python question views in the last five years. While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. And no hypothesis is given for the growth in question views, although they tease a future post about that. It would have been far more interesting if they correlated their stats to lines of code in github or something along those lines. To me, if anything I'm curious why python was so low percentage-wise in question views only five years ago. Anecdotally it doesn't seem to me that python usage in "industry" has grown that dramatically in the last five years, but there could be other factors involved such as education. Or my biased gut instinct could be completely off. (Note: been a python user for 20+ years.)

BeetleB 9y ago
As others have pointed out, more people coming out of school know it. When I started my job, the company (fairly large one) was mostly Perl. Perl was the big language of a past generation, so when those engineers were hired, Perl was king. I was told by at least two people that having Python on my resume is not a boost for engineering companies (not counting software), as most managers had never heard of it. Not too many years later, a lot of new work in the company is being done in Python. Why? Because that's what the newer employees know and prefer. I think in the software world, Python was big a long time ago (even in the days I joined). But non-software companies were stuck with Tcl and Perl for much longer. Now that they're shifting, you will see some of that growth.
d0mine 9y ago
They address this point in an earlier post on Flash (Flash is Dead). See near "Conclusion: do questions really represent the health of a technology?" https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/08/01/flash-dead-technologies-might-next/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/08/01/flash-dead-technologie...
Alex3917 9y ago
> To me, if anything I'm curious why python was so low percentage-wise in question views only five years ago. The majority of the top CS colleges switched to teaching using Python within the last five years. This provides a big reason for companies to use Python as well, since it drives down the cost of hiring.
- sametmax 9y ago
  Same in France, it's the default language now. It also mean more questions in SO by a lot of lost students. And it means later, more Python devs on the market.
kronos29296 9y ago
I think even though Python in the industry like in web isn't growing as much as say Node, in other places like Data Science and Intro to programming in Unis and Schools Python is growing very fast. The article is not narrow minded but has a narrow focus and only analyses concrete data from a single source. It may be globally accurate but indicates a rising trend in people being interested in python. While Python usage cannot be directly correlatd to SO, we can infer that languages that have more questions have more people using or learning it generally. In the same way languages with a small community of users don't always prefer SO but something more personal like Mailing lists or IRC (eg. J language). It should be safe to conclude that due to Data Science being the new buzz word and python at the forefront of it all, atleast python is getting a lot of attention even if it doesn't translate directly to more users right away.
- jzl 9y ago
  I just edited my comment to say narrowly focused rather than narrow-minded. That is definitely what I meant to convey but chose the wrong words, thanks for pointing it out.
coldtea 9y ago
>While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. You believe that Python would ever generate more questions over time on SO without getting more users/usage? I guess the mysterious dumbing down of a stable user base is an alternative explanation.
- alcalde 9y ago
  I get this same thing from the Delphi users forum, where the diehards strain to convince themselves that Delphi has "three million users" and "is about as popular as Python". They insist that there's no reason Stack Overflow questions should be correlated with real-world usage. One suggested, seriously, that perhaps Delphi is just so easy to use that users don't need to ask questions. This excuse has been adopted to explain a lack of commercially published books ("maybe everything to say about Delphi has already been said") and there was even an attempt to explain away job posting data. In that case it was theorized that Delphi jobs are filled as soon as they're posted while Java jobs go unfilled for months so when you see thousands of Java jobs on Dice but no Delphi jobs that actually means there's a huge Delphi jobs market and no one's actually using Java. :-( Never underestimate how far users of "sunset technologies" will go to convince themselves that their skill set is outdated. Heck, Embarcadero's C++ product manager insists that "customers tell him" that Delphi (Pascal!) is "five times more productive than Python" and he actually believes this too. The Delphi product manager, meanwhile, told me he sincerely believes that Delphi has had more of an impact on the business world than Python ever has. Meanwhile, the former VP of Developer Relations once polled the first 500 people to upgrade to their newest release of Delphi, crunched the data, and concluded that users really love Delphi (of course, the many who felt the upgrade was light on features and high on price and chose not to upgrade weren't reflected in the data). It makes me want to pull my hair out.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    Sounds like cognitive dissonance. I learned a lot about it by reading the Dilbert blog over the last couple of years. Here's an earlier example: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102627908761/job-satisfaction http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102627908761/job-satisfaction
doozy 9y ago
Fellow 20+ years Python user here. Python adoption outside first world countries have always lagged considerably behind. A common pattern among technologies. I suspect a lot of that growth is the rest of the world catching up.
- jzl 9y ago
  To the article's credit it actually differentiates between first world ("high income") countries and the rest of the world. The growth has been even more in high income countries so that explanation doesn't work for the data in the article.
  - doozy 9y ago
    Yes, I'm aware of that. I wasn't talking specifically about the data in the article but about Python's growth in general. I don't believe the popularity of a tag in a forum is a reliable indicator of the growth of a language, it may simply be this forum becoming more popular among Python users. Python's rising popularity among the scientific computing community is simply not enough to support the idea of a dramatic increase in Python adoption. As a long-time user of the language I share your appreciation Python usage in the industry has not dramatically increased in the past few years. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence suggesting Python is becoming increasingly popular outside high income countries.
AlexMax 9y ago
> Anecdotally it doesn't seem to me that python usage in "industry" has grown that dramatically in the last five years, but there could be other factors involved such as education. Or my biased gut instinct could be completely off. I actually was looking at these numbers just a few days ago, trying to decide on what language to embed in something I'm working on (CPython, Duktape Javascript or Lua), and came to the same confused realization - the number of Python questions on Stack Overflow had increased significantly over the last few years, but I couldn't quite correlate why. I put in a bunch of different related tags, but none of them could account for such a large jump. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cdjango%2Cflask%2Cpandas%2Cnumpy https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cdjan...
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  ML/AI hype started in 2011-2012.
- falmak 9y ago
  trying to decide on what language to embed in something I'm working on (CPython, Duktape Javascript or Lua) I'm trying to make a similar decision at the moment - have you chosen which of these languages to use? I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of each.

by jzl 9y ago

BeetleB 9y ago

As others have pointed out, more people coming out of school know it. When I started my job, the company (fairly large one) was mostly Perl. Perl was the big language of a past generation, so when those engineers were hired, Perl was king. I was told by at least two people that having Python on my resume is not a boost for engineering companies (not counting software), as most managers had never heard of it. Not too many years later, a lot of new work in the company is being done in Python. Why? Because that's what the newer employees know and prefer. I think in the software world, Python was big a long time ago (even in the days I joined). But non-software companies were stuck with Tcl and Perl for much longer. Now that they're shifting, you will see some of that growth.

d0mine 9y ago

They address this point in an earlier post on Flash (Flash is Dead). See near "Conclusion: do questions really represent the health of a technology?" https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/08/01/flash-dead-technologies-might-next/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/08/01/flash-dead-technologie...

Alex3917 9y ago

> To me, if anything I'm curious why python was so low percentage-wise in question views only five years ago. The majority of the top CS colleges switched to teaching using Python within the last five years. This provides a big reason for companies to use Python as well, since it drives down the cost of hiring.

sametmax 9y ago
Same in France, it's the default language now. It also mean more questions in SO by a lot of lost students. And it means later, more Python devs on the market.

kronos29296 9y ago

I think even though Python in the industry like in web isn't growing as much as say Node, in other places like Data Science and Intro to programming in Unis and Schools Python is growing very fast. The article is not narrow minded but has a narrow focus and only analyses concrete data from a single source. It may be globally accurate but indicates a rising trend in people being interested in python. While Python usage cannot be directly correlatd to SO, we can infer that languages that have more questions have more people using or learning it generally. In the same way languages with a small community of users don't always prefer SO but something more personal like Mailing lists or IRC (eg. J language). It should be safe to conclude that due to Data Science being the new buzz word and python at the forefront of it all, atleast python is getting a lot of attention even if it doesn't translate directly to more users right away.

jzl 9y ago
I just edited my comment to say narrowly focused rather than narrow-minded. That is definitely what I meant to convey but chose the wrong words, thanks for pointing it out.

coldtea 9y ago

>While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth. You believe that Python would ever generate more questions over time on SO without getting more users/usage? I guess the mysterious dumbing down of a stable user base is an alternative explanation.

alcalde 9y ago
I get this same thing from the Delphi users forum, where the diehards strain to convince themselves that Delphi has "three million users" and "is about as popular as Python". They insist that there's no reason Stack Overflow questions should be correlated with real-world usage. One suggested, seriously, that perhaps Delphi is just so easy to use that users don't need to ask questions. This excuse has been adopted to explain a lack of commercially published books ("maybe everything to say about Delphi has already been said") and there was even an attempt to explain away job posting data. In that case it was theorized that Delphi jobs are filled as soon as they're posted while Java jobs go unfilled for months so when you see thousands of Java jobs on Dice but no Delphi jobs that actually means there's a huge Delphi jobs market and no one's actually using Java. :-( Never underestimate how far users of "sunset technologies" will go to convince themselves that their skill set is outdated. Heck, Embarcadero's C++ product manager insists that "customers tell him" that Delphi (Pascal!) is "five times more productive than Python" and he actually believes this too. The Delphi product manager, meanwhile, told me he sincerely believes that Delphi has had more of an impact on the business world than Python ever has. Meanwhile, the former VP of Developer Relations once polled the first 500 people to upgrade to their newest release of Delphi, crunched the data, and concluded that users really love Delphi (of course, the many who felt the upgrade was light on features and high on price and chose not to upgrade weren't reflected in the data). It makes me want to pull my hair out.
- mark-r 9y ago
  Sounds like cognitive dissonance. I learned a lot about it by reading the Dilbert blog over the last couple of years. Here's an earlier example: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102627908761/job-satisfaction http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102627908761/job-satisfaction

doozy 9y ago

Fellow 20+ years Python user here. Python adoption outside first world countries have always lagged considerably behind. A common pattern among technologies. I suspect a lot of that growth is the rest of the world catching up.

jzl 9y ago
To the article's credit it actually differentiates between first world ("high income") countries and the rest of the world. The growth has been even more in high income countries so that explanation doesn't work for the data in the article.
- doozy 9y ago
  Yes, I'm aware of that. I wasn't talking specifically about the data in the article but about Python's growth in general. I don't believe the popularity of a tag in a forum is a reliable indicator of the growth of a language, it may simply be this forum becoming more popular among Python users. Python's rising popularity among the scientific computing community is simply not enough to support the idea of a dramatic increase in Python adoption. As a long-time user of the language I share your appreciation Python usage in the industry has not dramatically increased in the past few years. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence suggesting Python is becoming increasingly popular outside high income countries.

AlexMax 9y ago

> Anecdotally it doesn't seem to me that python usage in "industry" has grown that dramatically in the last five years, but there could be other factors involved such as education. Or my biased gut instinct could be completely off. I actually was looking at these numbers just a few days ago, trying to decide on what language to embed in something I'm working on (CPython, Duktape Javascript or Lua), and came to the same confused realization - the number of Python questions on Stack Overflow had increased significantly over the last few years, but I couldn't quite correlate why. I put in a bunch of different related tags, but none of them could account for such a large jump. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cdjango%2Cflask%2Cpandas%2Cnumpy https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cdjan...

myth_drannon 9y ago
ML/AI hype started in 2011-2012.
falmak 9y ago
trying to decide on what language to embed in something I'm working on (CPython, Duktape Javascript or Lua) I'm trying to make a similar decision at the moment - have you chosen which of these languages to use? I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of each.