5 ms·
A lot of this is side effects of the Python 2 vs 3 schism imo. If it weren't for that situation, practically everyone would on be 3.x, and supporting older vers
by sam0x17 7y ago
A lot of this is side effects of the Python 2 vs 3 schism imo. If it weren't for that situation, practically everyone would on be 3.x, and supporting older versions wouldn't be important, so package maintainership wouldn't be as difficult.
Put another way, the whole Python universe from my point of view has become a cautionary tale about breaking changes. Given Python's popularity, this might be an unpopular opinion, but I have yet to find someone who loves Python who still loves it as much when they discover other newer languages (I'm sure you exist, I just haven't met you!).
Python is having its time in the sun really because it is a default install for most unix distributions, so even people stuck in government labs can use it because 2.7 is already installed. Even apt depends on it via the debian software-properties package, so it isn't going anywhere any time soon.
The real question is how many people would use Python if it was as little known as, say, Elixir.
- newen 7y agoYep, Python is just a plain, boring interpreted language from the 80s that was designed as a reaction to Perl's syntax, and is unfortunate enough to contain a lot of dynamic properties that designing a JIT compiler for it is a massive amount of work. It can be seen in context with interpreted languages during that time such as Perl, Tcl, awk, sed, etc. It became popular because it was baby's first language taught in universities to both CS and non-CS majors. Python is simply not competitive in terms of language features with modern programming languages. I tend to assume most of the people praising Python are amateur or new programmers.