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I remember betting hard on python in 2008. I was all in. I watched as the ML space embraced it as the lingua franca. It was exciting. Best decision of my care

by netfl0 7y ago

I remember betting hard on python in 2008. I was all in. I watched as the ML space embraced it as the lingua franca. It was exciting. Best decision of my career :)

Waterluvian 7y ago
What does that mean?
- netfl0 7y ago
  It means focusing on learning the toolchains and ecosystem in my free time so that I was really productive with the technology.
- analog31 7y ago
  I'm a R&D scientist in private industry, and so I don't write commercial software, but have used programming as a tool throughout my career. For me, betting on Python meant migrating almost all of my technical work to Python based tools. Oddly enough it started at home. I was a long time Visual Basic programmer, but I decided to try Linux on my home computer, and needed a way to write simple programs. Going a step further, I decided that I wanted my tools to be open source and platform independent. After evaluating a few tools, I settled on Python and started playing with it. I tried out things like Maxima and Octave as well. A few months later, a big crisis landed in my lap at work, and I decided to use Python to develop the solution. I was amazed by how productive it seemed to be, and I decided to sweep more projects towards the event horizon of Python. I've also climbed aboard the "reproducible science" movement. Though I don't publish my work, reproducibility is just as much of a problem within a closed setting. Jupyter notebooks have made it much easier for me to dredge up an old project and figure out what I did, months or even years later.
quickthrower2 7y ago
What do you mean "betting hard"? It kind of implies that if you didn't get into python in 2008 you missed the boat. But in reality anyone who can code another programming language can pick up python if they want to do it for career reasons (or any other reason).
- timothycrosley 7y ago
  Similar to parent I bet hard on Python in 2008. That means I've been writing Python for over 10 years. Sure, any programmer can pick up a new language, but I'm able to build (what I believe) are useful projects and release them in Python every single week, outside of my full time job, community involvement and family: https://timothycrosley.com/ https://timothycrosley.com/. That level of productivity only comes from long term investment in a language IMHO.
  - chrisweekly 7y ago
    Nice choice. Also, great blog; your `whoami.md` is quite a read. Thank you for sharing! Keep it up!
    - elamje 7y ago
      I concur! https://timothycrosley.com/whoami https://timothycrosley.com/whoami
  - crtlaltdel 7y ago
    i first used python in ~2001-2002 and used it for many things, including a bunch of cgi-bin scripts for a very early VOIP startup. i did not consider myself to be a "dev" back then as i was mostly doing EE work and what little programming i did was split between limited firmware development and "scripting". python was an appealing way to script things out quickly. i didnt have much use for the OO, if anything finding it a layer of unneeded complexity. i would agree that there is an amazing amount of productivity to be gained by reaching for mastery over a language. that said, the efficacy of that mastery is determined by how "useful" the language is in a wider context. this is, for better or worse, highly influenced by "popularity" when it comes to programming languages. Mastering something like brainfuck? ymmv ;)
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    Thanks that makes perfect sense. Often it's the tooling and library experience that makes a difference not just the language. I feel the same way as you do about python about C#/.NET, and I'm happy to have picked C#. I think for most things it would be as good as Python, e.g. web-dev, app-dev. With Xamarin it's a great choice. For data science I'd have to go running to Python or R (maybe I'd do as much in C# as possible), but luckily I don't do much data science.
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I invested time in a similar way with Python and it has definitely been the most lucrative skill investment for me so far. I can think of a few specific projects in my early career where I wrote things in Python while other teams in my company were trying to write similar things in C++. The Python implementations (which used Cython for a few tiny performance critical sections) ended up running much, much faster than the C++ projects (which were written by very veteran C++ engineers at the time). More than that, they were easier to test, easier to modify, and easier to teach to random new programmers joining the team. We benefited from much more user-friendly third party tools and specialized domain tools and could easily wrap any of the in-house & domain tools only accessible in C/C++.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > The Python implementations (which used Cython for a few tiny performance critical sections) ended up running much, much faster than the C++ projects (which were written by very veteran C++ engineers at the time). More than that, they were easier to test, easier to modify I’m honestly really surprised. Can you provide some more detail as to how Python was beneficial for these?
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    It allowed me to write Cython for only small pieces of programs for which there is profiling evidence of a performance bottleneck. Cython is a slight superset of Python that compiles to heavily optimized C or C++. So it is extremely easy to write & autogenerate Python bindings to your own C extension modules. The difference is that it frees you to write Python (much easier to write & maintain) for everything, and only care about compiling down for speed in a few isolated places. Contrasted with writing everything in C/C++, this is a big advantage.
- rectangletangle 7y ago
  >much faster than C++ I've been writing Python for over a decade and I find this a bit surprising (not saying you're wrong). Python's strong suit was always speed of productivity over runtime speed IMO.
eweise 7y ago
I bet hard on java in 1998. Still winning... or am I?
- manishsharan 7y ago
  depends on what you call winning. Java will continue be to be used for boring enterprise applications, which are basically glorified CRUDs with pretty HTML GUI. Meanwhile, interesting stuff is being done on Python, Julia and R and Rust , if you also include system programming.
  - kamaal 7y ago
    Java is still where the excitement is. Also a few people would use Python for serious production facing applications. Python didn't even reach the fame Perl had in the 80s to mid 2000s. Python is for beginner programmers, who absolutely don't want to learn anything new at all.
    - shabda 7y ago
      > Python is for beginner programmers, who absolutely don't want to learn anything new at all. Python is used by the largest companies as well as the smallest one person company who need to get shit done. You can continue liking Java, without becoming bitter about Python.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - smt88 7y ago
    Rust is an interesting language with a fantastic community, but it was created to (and mostly does) very "boring" things.
- cltsang 7y ago
  That depends. If you bet on JSP, good luck. If you've shift to data or infrastructure, you're in good shape. There are lots of Apache projects[0] that are innovative and relevant today. [0] https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?language#Java https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?language#Java
RickJWagner 7y ago
Good call. I was already firmly invested in Java, another good choice. Another common choice was Ruby, probably not so good.
- eropple 7y ago
  Ruby is absolutely fine, even today. I've moved away from it and towards TypeScript and Kotlin mostly because I was always a static typing sort of person (most of my open source Ruby projects, like my OpenAPI 3 Rack framework[0], heavily used dry-types to give me some semblance of safety) but Rails 6 is really good if you're of a brain to enjoy Rails and the language itself is hard to criticize, IMO, when put up against JS (outside of TypeScript) or Python. [0] - https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby
smacktoward 7y ago
I remember betting hard on Python in the webdev space in 2003-2004. It was not the best decision of my career :-/

by netfl0 7y ago

I remember betting hard on python in 2008. I was all in. I watched as the ML space embraced it as the lingua franca. It was exciting. Best decision of my career :)

Waterluvian 7y ago

What does that mean?

netfl0 7y ago
It means focusing on learning the toolchains and ecosystem in my free time so that I was really productive with the technology.
analog31 7y ago
I'm a R&D scientist in private industry, and so I don't write commercial software, but have used programming as a tool throughout my career. For me, betting on Python meant migrating almost all of my technical work to Python based tools. Oddly enough it started at home. I was a long time Visual Basic programmer, but I decided to try Linux on my home computer, and needed a way to write simple programs. Going a step further, I decided that I wanted my tools to be open source and platform independent. After evaluating a few tools, I settled on Python and started playing with it. I tried out things like Maxima and Octave as well. A few months later, a big crisis landed in my lap at work, and I decided to use Python to develop the solution. I was amazed by how productive it seemed to be, and I decided to sweep more projects towards the event horizon of Python. I've also climbed aboard the "reproducible science" movement. Though I don't publish my work, reproducibility is just as much of a problem within a closed setting. Jupyter notebooks have made it much easier for me to dredge up an old project and figure out what I did, months or even years later.

quickthrower2 7y ago

What do you mean "betting hard"? It kind of implies that if you didn't get into python in 2008 you missed the boat. But in reality anyone who can code another programming language can pick up python if they want to do it for career reasons (or any other reason).

timothycrosley 7y ago
Similar to parent I bet hard on Python in 2008. That means I've been writing Python for over 10 years. Sure, any programmer can pick up a new language, but I'm able to build (what I believe) are useful projects and release them in Python every single week, outside of my full time job, community involvement and family: https://timothycrosley.com/ https://timothycrosley.com/. That level of productivity only comes from long term investment in a language IMHO.
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  Nice choice. Also, great blog; your `whoami.md` is quite a read. Thank you for sharing! Keep it up!
  - elamje 7y ago
    I concur! https://timothycrosley.com/whoami https://timothycrosley.com/whoami
- crtlaltdel 7y ago
  i first used python in ~2001-2002 and used it for many things, including a bunch of cgi-bin scripts for a very early VOIP startup. i did not consider myself to be a "dev" back then as i was mostly doing EE work and what little programming i did was split between limited firmware development and "scripting". python was an appealing way to script things out quickly. i didnt have much use for the OO, if anything finding it a layer of unneeded complexity. i would agree that there is an amazing amount of productivity to be gained by reaching for mastery over a language. that said, the efficacy of that mastery is determined by how "useful" the language is in a wider context. this is, for better or worse, highly influenced by "popularity" when it comes to programming languages. Mastering something like brainfuck? ymmv ;)
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Thanks that makes perfect sense. Often it's the tooling and library experience that makes a difference not just the language. I feel the same way as you do about python about C#/.NET, and I'm happy to have picked C#. I think for most things it would be as good as Python, e.g. web-dev, app-dev. With Xamarin it's a great choice. For data science I'd have to go running to Python or R (maybe I'd do as much in C# as possible), but luckily I don't do much data science.

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I invested time in a similar way with Python and it has definitely been the most lucrative skill investment for me so far. I can think of a few specific projects in my early career where I wrote things in Python while other teams in my company were trying to write similar things in C++. The Python implementations (which used Cython for a few tiny performance critical sections) ended up running much, much faster than the C++ projects (which were written by very veteran C++ engineers at the time). More than that, they were easier to test, easier to modify, and easier to teach to random new programmers joining the team. We benefited from much more user-friendly third party tools and specialized domain tools and could easily wrap any of the in-house & domain tools only accessible in C/C++.

saagarjha 7y ago
> The Python implementations (which used Cython for a few tiny performance critical sections) ended up running much, much faster than the C++ projects (which were written by very veteran C++ engineers at the time). More than that, they were easier to test, easier to modify I’m honestly really surprised. Can you provide some more detail as to how Python was beneficial for these?
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  It allowed me to write Cython for only small pieces of programs for which there is profiling evidence of a performance bottleneck. Cython is a slight superset of Python that compiles to heavily optimized C or C++. So it is extremely easy to write & autogenerate Python bindings to your own C extension modules. The difference is that it frees you to write Python (much easier to write & maintain) for everything, and only care about compiling down for speed in a few isolated places. Contrasted with writing everything in C/C++, this is a big advantage.
rectangletangle 7y ago
>much faster than C++ I've been writing Python for over a decade and I find this a bit surprising (not saying you're wrong). Python's strong suit was always speed of productivity over runtime speed IMO.

eweise 7y ago

I bet hard on java in 1998. Still winning... or am I?

manishsharan 7y ago
depends on what you call winning. Java will continue be to be used for boring enterprise applications, which are basically glorified CRUDs with pretty HTML GUI. Meanwhile, interesting stuff is being done on Python, Julia and R and Rust , if you also include system programming.
- kamaal 7y ago
  Java is still where the excitement is. Also a few people would use Python for serious production facing applications. Python didn't even reach the fame Perl had in the 80s to mid 2000s. Python is for beginner programmers, who absolutely don't want to learn anything new at all.
  - shabda 7y ago
    > Python is for beginner programmers, who absolutely don't want to learn anything new at all. Python is used by the largest companies as well as the smallest one person company who need to get shit done. You can continue liking Java, without becoming bitter about Python.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- smt88 7y ago
  Rust is an interesting language with a fantastic community, but it was created to (and mostly does) very "boring" things.
cltsang 7y ago
That depends. If you bet on JSP, good luck. If you've shift to data or infrastructure, you're in good shape. There are lots of Apache projects[0] that are innovative and relevant today. [0] https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?language#Java https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?language#Java

RickJWagner 7y ago

Good call. I was already firmly invested in Java, another good choice. Another common choice was Ruby, probably not so good.

eropple 7y ago
Ruby is absolutely fine, even today. I've moved away from it and towards TypeScript and Kotlin mostly because I was always a static typing sort of person (most of my open source Ruby projects, like my OpenAPI 3 Rack framework[0], heavily used dry-types to give me some semblance of safety) but Rails 6 is really good if you're of a brain to enjoy Rails and the language itself is hard to criticize, IMO, when put up against JS (outside of TypeScript) or Python. [0] - https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby

smacktoward 7y ago

I remember betting hard on Python in the webdev space in 2003-2004. It was not the best decision of my career :-/