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Python is growing because it's a good scripting language, and there's a need in the ML community for a standard language to write scripts in. The ML community i
by ilovecaching 8y ago
Python is growing because it's a good scripting language, and there's a need in the ML community for a standard language to write scripts in. The ML community is growing like crazy, thus Python grows. Even though Python is secretly calling Fortran for scipy, or Tensorflow (C++), or PyTorch (also C++), all of which would make good candidates for Rust replacements. So obviously speed is necessary to enable what people are doing in Python.
I make the distinction between script and what we software engineers do, because I had the misfortune of spending half a decade in research doing ML, and those guys are not writing production programs. They're hacking out Jupyter notebooks and writing precariously balanced code that barely works.
That doesn't make Python suitable for large applications. It doesn't diminish the fact that CUDA is growing, SGX is growing, embedded is growing, that we're now unlocking 100G fiber, that we've reached the limits of single core performance, that intel is rolling out 8+ core consumer CPUs. Python is not going to shine for any of these things, but Rust will.
- scardine 8y agotl;dr: despite being relatively slow Python is a fantastic glue language. Some people thing rust is well positioned to steal Python's dinner.
- ilovecaching 8y agoThat's not what I said. I said Rust was a good candidate for all the things Python is using to actually do useful work. The underlying libraries written in Fortran, C, and C++. Don't tl;dr; if you don't know how to r.
- mbo 8y agoTo be fair, it's much more likely that Julia will be stealing Python's dinner, rather than Rust.
- olavk 8y agoDjango is not going to be rewritten in Julia. Neither is Linux going to be rewritten in Python. Different languages have different domains. Some of these comments seem to think all languages is competing in the same domain as if Rust is a direct competitor to Julia or JavaScript.
- mbo 8y agoThe context of the comment I replied to was that Python was fantastic glue code _for scientific computing_. Julia won't won't impinge on Django's usage share.
- olavk 8y agoRust will not steal Pythons dinner, they are used for completely different domains. The comment was saying that Rust might be a realistic alternative to C/C++/Fortran for modules which are not written in Python.