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Perhaps. Or perhaps programming instructors like Python better. When I taught statistics, R was more popular and featureful for the task than Python, yet I chos

• taeric 8y ago
  If the competition is R, I can see how python is a pretty language. I think R still has prettier charts, with ggplot. However, there can be little argument that it is a peculiar language. That said, I don't see much that python really has going for it in the pretty scenario, either. Most of the examples that make it worth looking at get ugly as quickly as most any other programming language. And the error messages are no more helpful than any of a myriad other languages. None of which is to say I think it is bad. Just I suspect it is getting credit for some intrinsic quality that doesn't really exist. It is getting used because it is the language people know is getting used.
  • xapata 8y ago
    Not as any other language, but as any recently designed language. They (almost) all have good REPLs and a decent variety of data structures. It's easy to compare Python against C or Java and say how great it is, but against Rust or Dart, maybe not so great. However, popularity has its own benefits. Still, compare against Go. There's a major difference in philosophy of deployment. Python's modularity causes dev ops problems, but it also means that any user can monkey patch whatever they need. With Go you need access to the original source, which isn't necessarily provided.
    • taeric 8y ago
      Fair, I meant as any comparable language. Though, I confess I suspect people could make more progress with C and the like than the advocates of python would like to acknowledge. And I'm quite fond of lisp nowadays.