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i don't know, there are Golang, Python, Javascript, Ruby, PHP conferences and probably a lot more, so not sure if that argument is valid.

mikestew 8y ago
Of the ones you list, only one has a wide focus, IMO. Three of those will essentially be web development conferences, and I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things. Python probably has broad enough usage and scope to counter what I said. The exception proves the rule. :-)
- tpush 8y ago
  I mean, there's CppCon as mentioned in the article, and C++ has pretty much the same wide reach as C.
  - AlphaSite 8y ago
    To be honest C is kinda boring. Which is fine, but makes it hard to do a C conference.
    - varjag 8y ago
      Fair point, but Go or PHP hardly sound more exciting.
      - Koshkin 8y ago
        I guess, some languages have to fight for their place under the sun, some don't.
      - cies 8y ago
        That for different reasons. Go is not a general purpose language (it's creators specifically focus it's uses on networked apps). PHP is on the decline, nothing kills excitement like decline.
      - weberc2 8y ago
        I'm a heavy Go and Python user, and you're right that Go isn't particularly interesting--it doesn't change terribly rapidly, but it's also simple enough that you can do interesting and useful deep-dive sessions into the garbage collector or scheduler or other aspects of the runtime or the toolchain. You could also speculate or discuss proposals for Go2. There have also been significant recent changes to the dependency management scheme which affect pretty much everyone. I don't think there's much of an analog for C. Most of the interesting stuff in C revolves around things you would think you can depend on but actually break in really weird and interesting ways (misc undefined behavior, sizes for integral types on different architectures, idiosyncracies of the preprocessor, the way to trivially exploit that pattern you used to avoid buffer overflow exploits). But most of that is just depressing.
    - welly 8y ago
      Boring in what way? Some of the coolest stuff we work with is built with C. C is ace. C is cooler than C++
    - spork12 8y ago
      I think it's more that C programmers don't really consider themselves part of a C culture in the same way that python, go, ruby, php etc programmers do. C programmers usually have another interest like kernel dev, firmware dev, or 3d game engines that is more interesting to them than the language itself.
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    Please tell me that CppCon isn't a conference just for the C Preprocessor? I hate it when you go to one of those Makerfests, and it actually turns out to be about Makefiles.
    - inoiox 8y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon Actually is a really good conference to learn Software Development beyond C++
  - simias 8y ago
    C++ is a wildly unstable language compared to C. Every new standard brings a slew of new coding paradigms and features, often changing the way to write C++ code pretty fundamentally. On top of that C++ is a hellish beast of a language of such tremendous complexity that you can probably host hundreds of conference where you'd teach even experienced C++ coders things they don't know. They won't run out of material any time soon. Meanwhile a C conference would have a hard time coming up with interesting content year after year IMO. You'd end up having to talk about how C is used more than C itself, but then you're no longer really doing C-con, you're doing "embedded-con" or "high performance trading con" etc... I agree with the parent when they compare C to a hammer, it's a super useful tool and I'm glad that we have it but it's not like I could talk about it for hours (or hear somebody else talk about it for that matter).
    - shaklee3 8y ago
      This is completely false. C++11 introduced a lot of new paradigms, and that's it. That shift was for the better, and I haven't met a single person who can honestly say that the changes they made turned it into a worse language. Quite the opposite: it's more expressive, readable, and easier to use.
      - simias 8y ago
        My comment wasn't meant to disparage C++, I'm not saying it's not improving, I'm just pointing out that it's a massively complex language and that it's still evolving in major ways so there's stuff to talk about. C hasn't really introduced significant "new paradigms" in a long while.
- lettergram 8y ago
  Python is probably mostly data science if I had to guess. jupyter notebooks have made python excessively used for data science.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Python is probably mostly data science if I had to guess. You think? I'll admit that my view of the Python community is super narrow, but I was thinking Django, me writing a bunch of test scripts, backend stuff. I know data science is a "thing" with Python, but I just didn't imagine that it had become it's main use. I guess TIL there's a whole other world of how people use Python, and it might be most of them. :-)
    - laingc 8y ago
      I run an ML team whose primary language is Python, and I’ve been doing scientific computation in Python (eg finite elements, numerical optimisation) in Python for a long time. My personal impression is that Python is used in more fields than almost any other language, but that every community is only peripherally aware of other communities. For example, Python is big in Earth Sciences (or so I am told). Almost nobody outside Earth Sciences knows that. Until maybe 5 years ago, I had no idea that people used Python for web development. It had just never occurred to me. GvR famously had to google what wsgi was. So I think your final sentence probably applies to most users of Python.
      - milesvp 8y ago
        Yup. Python has some really good GIS libraries. So field that needs to deal with map data will often find itself drawn to python. And since it's a pretty newb friendly language you find that people who wouldn't otherwise program write simple scripts to manipulate the data and maybe output it to a csv so they can import it to excel.
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      Python was popular (though smaller) before NumPy and everything dependent on it came about.
- johnaoss 8y ago
  People are doing basically everything in Go right now! Front-end web development being the exception (though there is GopherJS...). Projects like Docker, Kubernetes, CockroachDB, Consul (and anything Hashicorp does), Mattermost, and etcd are all being written in Go! Anecdotally, I've heard people using Go to rewrite some of their Ruby services in which more performance is needed.
- weberc2 8y ago
  > I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things The 2018 Go user survey analysis should be released soon, but I'm guessing you're right that it's only used for a few things; however, those few things are pretty significant in terms of marketshare (distributed systems, backend applications, and general purpose tooling--this hypothesis could probably be checked against the StackOverflow survey). Not much on the front-end or mobile application side nor on the embedded side, but probably making some headway on the AI/ML/data-science side. In general, I think of Go as Python but with 15 years of hindsight but also 15 years of market catchup. Go does a lot of things better than Python (performance, concurrency, distribution, deployment, etc), but the reverse isn't true. The principle advantage to Python is that it was the lingua franca for the data science niche before the niche became a mainstream competency--this means more people were exposed to Python rapidly, but it also means that people are beginning to build high-quality data science libraries in other languages, including Go, which closes the gap between Python and other languages.
  - holografix 8y ago
    I’m a beginner in Go and not an expert in Python. However Python is a lot easier to develop with than Go: generics, no pointers, standard collections have many convenience functions, package handling, etc.
    - adrianpike 8y ago
      > no pointers FWIW, this is one of the biggest selling points of Golang for me - I love the fact that I'm able to be explicit about reference vs. value, and that it prevents me from shooting myself in the foot when I inevitably screw it up. It's enough of a differentiator for me that I almost can't put languages with and without pointers in the same mental bucket.
    - klodolph 8y ago
      Saying that Python has "no pointers" is a bit of an oversimplification, somewhere between "technically true, but misleading" and "actually incorrect", depending on how you define your terms and frame the question. Remember that Java has "no pointers" too, it works basically the same way Python does (except for some minor quibbles about primitive types), except if you go to 4.3.1 of the Java SE 11 spec and look for "pointer" you'll find the flat admission that Java has pointers. The part about pointers that makes programming hard is that you can create multiple references to the same object, and if you don't realize this, you can modify something that you didn't realize you were modifying. In Python this can happen easily enough: a = [] b = a a.append(1) Question: what is the value of b? You might think that this is pretty obvious, but once you can answer this question correctly, you basically understand pointers. In fact, it's not really relevant whether you say that "a" and "b" are pointers or whether you say that they are object references, conceptually, it does not matter what you call them. The fact that Golang has different syntax for pointers and the fact that you can get the address of local variables or member fields is no big deal, since understanding how pointers work is the hard part, and Python already makes you do that. Package handling in practice I would say is a wash, more or less. Both Python and Golang have multiple different ways of managing packages, depending on your preferences. It's flat incorrect to say that Python has generics. What Python has is dynamic typing. Golang has interface{}, which is equivalent to what Python has, except it requires casting.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days It mostly falls under the rubric of "writing servers."

mikestew 8y ago

Of the ones you list, only one has a wide focus, IMO. Three of those will essentially be web development conferences, and I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things. Python probably has broad enough usage and scope to counter what I said. The exception proves the rule. :-)

tpush 8y ago
I mean, there's CppCon as mentioned in the article, and C++ has pretty much the same wide reach as C.
- AlphaSite 8y ago
  To be honest C is kinda boring. Which is fine, but makes it hard to do a C conference.
  - varjag 8y ago
    Fair point, but Go or PHP hardly sound more exciting.
    - Koshkin 8y ago
      I guess, some languages have to fight for their place under the sun, some don't.
    - cies 8y ago
      That for different reasons. Go is not a general purpose language (it's creators specifically focus it's uses on networked apps). PHP is on the decline, nothing kills excitement like decline.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      I'm a heavy Go and Python user, and you're right that Go isn't particularly interesting--it doesn't change terribly rapidly, but it's also simple enough that you can do interesting and useful deep-dive sessions into the garbage collector or scheduler or other aspects of the runtime or the toolchain. You could also speculate or discuss proposals for Go2. There have also been significant recent changes to the dependency management scheme which affect pretty much everyone. I don't think there's much of an analog for C. Most of the interesting stuff in C revolves around things you would think you can depend on but actually break in really weird and interesting ways (misc undefined behavior, sizes for integral types on different architectures, idiosyncracies of the preprocessor, the way to trivially exploit that pattern you used to avoid buffer overflow exploits). But most of that is just depressing.
  - welly 8y ago
    Boring in what way? Some of the coolest stuff we work with is built with C. C is ace. C is cooler than C++
  - spork12 8y ago
    I think it's more that C programmers don't really consider themselves part of a C culture in the same way that python, go, ruby, php etc programmers do. C programmers usually have another interest like kernel dev, firmware dev, or 3d game engines that is more interesting to them than the language itself.
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  Please tell me that CppCon isn't a conference just for the C Preprocessor? I hate it when you go to one of those Makerfests, and it actually turns out to be about Makefiles.
  - inoiox 8y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon Actually is a really good conference to learn Software Development beyond C++
- simias 8y ago
  C++ is a wildly unstable language compared to C. Every new standard brings a slew of new coding paradigms and features, often changing the way to write C++ code pretty fundamentally. On top of that C++ is a hellish beast of a language of such tremendous complexity that you can probably host hundreds of conference where you'd teach even experienced C++ coders things they don't know. They won't run out of material any time soon. Meanwhile a C conference would have a hard time coming up with interesting content year after year IMO. You'd end up having to talk about how C is used more than C itself, but then you're no longer really doing C-con, you're doing "embedded-con" or "high performance trading con" etc... I agree with the parent when they compare C to a hammer, it's a super useful tool and I'm glad that we have it but it's not like I could talk about it for hours (or hear somebody else talk about it for that matter).
  - shaklee3 8y ago
    This is completely false. C++11 introduced a lot of new paradigms, and that's it. That shift was for the better, and I haven't met a single person who can honestly say that the changes they made turned it into a worse language. Quite the opposite: it's more expressive, readable, and easier to use.
    - simias 8y ago
      My comment wasn't meant to disparage C++, I'm not saying it's not improving, I'm just pointing out that it's a massively complex language and that it's still evolving in major ways so there's stuff to talk about. C hasn't really introduced significant "new paradigms" in a long while.
lettergram 8y ago
Python is probably mostly data science if I had to guess. jupyter notebooks have made python excessively used for data science.
- mikestew 8y ago
  Python is probably mostly data science if I had to guess. You think? I'll admit that my view of the Python community is super narrow, but I was thinking Django, me writing a bunch of test scripts, backend stuff. I know data science is a "thing" with Python, but I just didn't imagine that it had become it's main use. I guess TIL there's a whole other world of how people use Python, and it might be most of them. :-)
  - laingc 8y ago
    I run an ML team whose primary language is Python, and I’ve been doing scientific computation in Python (eg finite elements, numerical optimisation) in Python for a long time. My personal impression is that Python is used in more fields than almost any other language, but that every community is only peripherally aware of other communities. For example, Python is big in Earth Sciences (or so I am told). Almost nobody outside Earth Sciences knows that. Until maybe 5 years ago, I had no idea that people used Python for web development. It had just never occurred to me. GvR famously had to google what wsgi was. So I think your final sentence probably applies to most users of Python.
    - milesvp 8y ago
      Yup. Python has some really good GIS libraries. So field that needs to deal with map data will often find itself drawn to python. And since it's a pretty newb friendly language you find that people who wouldn't otherwise program write simple scripts to manipulate the data and maybe output it to a csv so they can import it to excel.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Python was popular (though smaller) before NumPy and everything dependent on it came about.
johnaoss 8y ago
People are doing basically everything in Go right now! Front-end web development being the exception (though there is GopherJS...). Projects like Docker, Kubernetes, CockroachDB, Consul (and anything Hashicorp does), Mattermost, and etcd are all being written in Go! Anecdotally, I've heard people using Go to rewrite some of their Ruby services in which more performance is needed.
weberc2 8y ago
> I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things The 2018 Go user survey analysis should be released soon, but I'm guessing you're right that it's only used for a few things; however, those few things are pretty significant in terms of marketshare (distributed systems, backend applications, and general purpose tooling--this hypothesis could probably be checked against the StackOverflow survey). Not much on the front-end or mobile application side nor on the embedded side, but probably making some headway on the AI/ML/data-science side. In general, I think of Go as Python but with 15 years of hindsight but also 15 years of market catchup. Go does a lot of things better than Python (performance, concurrency, distribution, deployment, etc), but the reverse isn't true. The principle advantage to Python is that it was the lingua franca for the data science niche before the niche became a mainstream competency--this means more people were exposed to Python rapidly, but it also means that people are beginning to build high-quality data science libraries in other languages, including Go, which closes the gap between Python and other languages.
- holografix 8y ago
  I’m a beginner in Go and not an expert in Python. However Python is a lot easier to develop with than Go: generics, no pointers, standard collections have many convenience functions, package handling, etc.
  - adrianpike 8y ago
    > no pointers FWIW, this is one of the biggest selling points of Golang for me - I love the fact that I'm able to be explicit about reference vs. value, and that it prevents me from shooting myself in the foot when I inevitably screw it up. It's enough of a differentiator for me that I almost can't put languages with and without pointers in the same mental bucket.
  - klodolph 8y ago
    Saying that Python has "no pointers" is a bit of an oversimplification, somewhere between "technically true, but misleading" and "actually incorrect", depending on how you define your terms and frame the question. Remember that Java has "no pointers" too, it works basically the same way Python does (except for some minor quibbles about primitive types), except if you go to 4.3.1 of the Java SE 11 spec and look for "pointer" you'll find the flat admission that Java has pointers. The part about pointers that makes programming hard is that you can create multiple references to the same object, and if you don't realize this, you can modify something that you didn't realize you were modifying. In Python this can happen easily enough: a = [] b = a a.append(1) Question: what is the value of b? You might think that this is pretty obvious, but once you can answer this question correctly, you basically understand pointers. In fact, it's not really relevant whether you say that "a" and "b" are pointers or whether you say that they are object references, conceptually, it does not matter what you call them. The fact that Golang has different syntax for pointers and the fact that you can get the address of local variables or member fields is no big deal, since understanding how pointers work is the hard part, and Python already makes you do that. Package handling in practice I would say is a wash, more or less. Both Python and Golang have multiple different ways of managing packages, depending on your preferences. It's flat incorrect to say that Python has generics. What Python has is dynamic typing. Golang has interface{}, which is equivalent to what Python has, except it requires casting.
stcredzero 8y ago
I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days It mostly falls under the rubric of "writing servers."