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> Python for example, horrible runtime performance, but people were drawn to it for probably syntax and tooling reasons. Tooling? How so? Like the REPL? Becaus

> Python for example, horrible runtime performance, but people were drawn to it for probably syntax and tooling reasons. Tooling? How so? Like the REPL? Because when I think of tooling, I think of things like IDEs, dependency management, and distribution. Python has one of those things now (IDEs/notebooks), but even that took a while, IMO. Python is a weird case study for me. I'm not trying to flame war or anything- just pointing out my own blind spots and/or biases. But I just don't see much of anything redeeming about the language. It can be pretty easy to read, but I don't think most code I've seen actually is easy to read/follow.

saghm 6y ago
I think it's worth keeping in mind that when Python got popular, there weren't options like Go or Node (or any other big player in server-side JS) that might hit different points on the performance versus ease of writing tradeoff. My understanding is that Python took off in a world where the other choices for languages were things like Perl and Java. Compared to Perl, Python does have a reputation of being much more readable, and compared to Java, it has the reputation of being much easier to write. People were attracted to the language initially for that, and then as the community grew, other benefits started appearing, like a rich ecosystem of third-party packages. Nowadays, other languages have appeared that offer different productivity tradeoffs, some with much better performance, so it's possible that Python won't be the first choice of as many people as before, but I don't think it's particularly surprising that people who have used it and been productive with it for years still continue to enjoy working in it. The experience of working in a language like Python hasn't actually gotten worse just because something like Go exists; it's just that some people who might have picked Go over Python 20 years ago picked Python back then because Go didn't exist yet.

saghm 6y ago

I think it's worth keeping in mind that when Python got popular, there weren't options like Go or Node (or any other big player in server-side JS) that might hit different points on the performance versus ease of writing tradeoff. My understanding is that Python took off in a world where the other choices for languages were things like Perl and Java. Compared to Perl, Python does have a reputation of being much more readable, and compared to Java, it has the reputation of being much easier to write. People were attracted to the language initially for that, and then as the community grew, other benefits started appearing, like a rich ecosystem of third-party packages. Nowadays, other languages have appeared that offer different productivity tradeoffs, some with much better performance, so it's possible that Python won't be the first choice of as many people as before, but I don't think it's particularly surprising that people who have used it and been productive with it for years still continue to enjoy working in it. The experience of working in a language like Python hasn't actually gotten worse just because something like Go exists; it's just that some people who might have picked Go over Python 20 years ago picked Python back then because Go didn't exist yet.