5 ms·

I bet there are many static typed, compiled languages. But they never get any traction because they are not "sexy" like the newest hyped dynamic language. There

by leon_ 15y ago

I bet there are many static typed, compiled languages. But they never get any traction because they are not "sexy" like the newest hyped dynamic language. There are many devs who don't care for static typing - they just want to hack their backend in a weekend and be done. Those devs seem to be the vocal ones with blogs and social media power users behind them. Look at Python. Python is over 20 years old. It has been here since before Windows 95 but only got prominent (in the broad public) in the last few years because some opinion leaders of the hip and young crowd found out you could make cool web apps with it and hyped it into oblivion. I bet if Go hadn't the names behind it it wouldn't get any more traction than any other of the gazillions of programming languages that die silently. I guess not many home brew languages get talking time at a Google conference. Let's be just happy that Go seems to get a little popular - maybe it will be enough for a break through. I'd love that.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jergosh 15y ago
Python is too good a language not to have made it. Google endorsement helped a lot, but they chose it because it's great.
- kamaal 15y ago
  Not true, I remember a few years back being a major Perl shop. The advice from senior guy in the hierarchy to use Python was 'If Google is using it, it must be good'. And I know whole bunch of people around me in many projects used it just because of Google. Every tool has its own merit Python is nothing special in this regard. Python's low barrier to entry has invited many newbie's to pick it up in a day or two and get going with solving problems. But it has its own flaws and isn't that great as often people project it to be. My own experience with Python, after being a heavy Perl and Ruby user isn't that good. Especially if you are coming from a language like Perl, Python as a language has an interesting trend. At first you feel very happy that things are so simple with it. Then slowly once you learn the language and start getting deeper into it, you try to use it for day to day work. Suddenly you realize that text processing sucks badly, something that is very big problem on Unix based environments. Writing a single regex takes a 10's of lines of exception handling. You try to use it for quick dirty scripting, again the language runs out of steam very soon. Its just too verbose for scripting class. Now coming to more important reasons. Sacrificing power for readability might be great for newbie's but isn't good experienced programmers. Lack of multiline lambda's, no good support for TOC, GIL, barely there object system(compared to Moose), lack of extensibility, lack of syntax plugins. Forcing one way of doing things, all this is great hindrance if one wants to climb upper steps in the ladder of programming. And above all lack of thing like CPAN is just something more than sufficient reason above everything else. I left Python for Perl, but had to go back again. Python wasn't just serving the need for day to day quick scripting. Which I often need to do twice or thrice a day. Text is uneliminable part of large IT projects. Tools like Perl, sed , awk help me do my job quickly everyday. Slowly I realized if I'm using Perl every 50 minutes, I might as well use it for long term projects. On the other hand, Best practices matter for every project. You can writeable and un maintainable code both in any language. We are back to being a Perl shop again. And its the best decision we have made.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jergosh 15y ago
    Incidentally, I'm working on a language comparison which includes Perl and Python and I would be interested to see how Perl string handling is superior. Did you mean speed or syntax or both? I always thought that the Perl way is quite friendly if you have Unix background, but since Python does everything by function calls it's also fine. As for exception handling, I guess it'll always be shorter in Perl since it doesn't really support exceptions...
    - kamaal 15y ago
      Perl has exception handling, its only that its not available via your usual try-catch syntax. If you want a more sugary exception handling syntax there is always Try::Tiny ( http://search.cpan.org/~doy/Try-Tiny-0.09/lib/Try/Tiny.pm http://search.cpan.org/~doy/Try-Tiny-0.09/lib/Try/Tiny.pm). Another advantage Perl has over Python in case of parsing is that regular expressions are first class elements in Perl, so they can be passed around like objects. Combine them with more powerful things like given-when(http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements) and parsing becomes a lot more easier when compared to Python. Smart matching is a great feature. And all this obviously leads to better performance in terms of speed because less code to process means (to an extent faster code). And syntactically as well. Imagine doing such a thing in Python. There isn't smart match operator at the first place, there is no switch statement, and on top of that dealing with innumerable regular expression functions(compile,match,search) with try-catch statements inside if-else loops. This piece of code in Python won't be easy to read and solution isn't elegant and better than Perl either. Perl turns out to be better in all ways, the code is readable, concise, faster and powerful.
      - jergosh 15y ago
        Yeah, it's through eval() which is a questionable design decision at best. Regular expressions can be passed as objects in Python, too. Three functions is hardly 'innumerable'. "Perl turns out to be better in all ways, the code is readable, concise, faster and powerful." To each his own, I guess.
dkarl 15y ago
Python is over 20 years old. It has been here since before Windows 95 but only got prominent (in the broad public) in the last few years because some opinion leaders of the hip and young crowd found out you could make cool web apps with it and hyped it into oblivion. Hmm, I thought it became popular for scientific applications and as an anti-Perl for scripting before it became popular for web apps? I first got into Python because I needed a scripting language. People said, "If you don't like the design philosophy of Perl, then you might like Python, which made the opposite choices." The centerpiece of Python advocacy back in the day was this article by Eric Raymond: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 I know that's the article that convinced me to try Python. Everything he praised about Python screamed "opposite of Perl!" and after experiencing my mind rejecting Perl like a body rejecting a transplanted organ, I was desperate for an alternative that would make me as productive at scripting as the Perl gurus. (Yes, I'm still jealous of the one-liners.) So there is certainly room for a language to grow and become popular without having a first-class web framework. (These days any popular language will sprout a few web frameworks, but they don't have to become popular for the language to succeed.)
- Splines 15y ago
  Also IMO the ActiveState did alot to make perl & Python popular. Only in the last 10 years or so did ActivePython become really useful. In the last 90's it seemed (in my mind, at least) to play second fiddle to ActivePerl.

by leon_ 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jergosh 15y ago

Python is too good a language not to have made it. Google endorsement helped a lot, but they chose it because it's great.

kamaal 15y ago
Not true, I remember a few years back being a major Perl shop. The advice from senior guy in the hierarchy to use Python was 'If Google is using it, it must be good'. And I know whole bunch of people around me in many projects used it just because of Google. Every tool has its own merit Python is nothing special in this regard. Python's low barrier to entry has invited many newbie's to pick it up in a day or two and get going with solving problems. But it has its own flaws and isn't that great as often people project it to be. My own experience with Python, after being a heavy Perl and Ruby user isn't that good. Especially if you are coming from a language like Perl, Python as a language has an interesting trend. At first you feel very happy that things are so simple with it. Then slowly once you learn the language and start getting deeper into it, you try to use it for day to day work. Suddenly you realize that text processing sucks badly, something that is very big problem on Unix based environments. Writing a single regex takes a 10's of lines of exception handling. You try to use it for quick dirty scripting, again the language runs out of steam very soon. Its just too verbose for scripting class. Now coming to more important reasons. Sacrificing power for readability might be great for newbie's but isn't good experienced programmers. Lack of multiline lambda's, no good support for TOC, GIL, barely there object system(compared to Moose), lack of extensibility, lack of syntax plugins. Forcing one way of doing things, all this is great hindrance if one wants to climb upper steps in the ladder of programming. And above all lack of thing like CPAN is just something more than sufficient reason above everything else. I left Python for Perl, but had to go back again. Python wasn't just serving the need for day to day quick scripting. Which I often need to do twice or thrice a day. Text is uneliminable part of large IT projects. Tools like Perl, sed , awk help me do my job quickly everyday. Slowly I realized if I'm using Perl every 50 minutes, I might as well use it for long term projects. On the other hand, Best practices matter for every project. You can writeable and un maintainable code both in any language. We are back to being a Perl shop again. And its the best decision we have made.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jergosh 15y ago
  Incidentally, I'm working on a language comparison which includes Perl and Python and I would be interested to see how Perl string handling is superior. Did you mean speed or syntax or both? I always thought that the Perl way is quite friendly if you have Unix background, but since Python does everything by function calls it's also fine. As for exception handling, I guess it'll always be shorter in Perl since it doesn't really support exceptions...
  - kamaal 15y ago
    Perl has exception handling, its only that its not available via your usual try-catch syntax. If you want a more sugary exception handling syntax there is always Try::Tiny ( http://search.cpan.org/~doy/Try-Tiny-0.09/lib/Try/Tiny.pm http://search.cpan.org/~doy/Try-Tiny-0.09/lib/Try/Tiny.pm). Another advantage Perl has over Python in case of parsing is that regular expressions are first class elements in Perl, so they can be passed around like objects. Combine them with more powerful things like given-when(http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements) and parsing becomes a lot more easier when compared to Python. Smart matching is a great feature. And all this obviously leads to better performance in terms of speed because less code to process means (to an extent faster code). And syntactically as well. Imagine doing such a thing in Python. There isn't smart match operator at the first place, there is no switch statement, and on top of that dealing with innumerable regular expression functions(compile,match,search) with try-catch statements inside if-else loops. This piece of code in Python won't be easy to read and solution isn't elegant and better than Perl either. Perl turns out to be better in all ways, the code is readable, concise, faster and powerful.
    - jergosh 15y ago
      Yeah, it's through eval() which is a questionable design decision at best. Regular expressions can be passed as objects in Python, too. Three functions is hardly 'innumerable'. "Perl turns out to be better in all ways, the code is readable, concise, faster and powerful." To each his own, I guess.

dkarl 15y ago

Python is over 20 years old. It has been here since before Windows 95 but only got prominent (in the broad public) in the last few years because some opinion leaders of the hip and young crowd found out you could make cool web apps with it and hyped it into oblivion. Hmm, I thought it became popular for scientific applications and as an anti-Perl for scripting before it became popular for web apps? I first got into Python because I needed a scripting language. People said, "If you don't like the design philosophy of Perl, then you might like Python, which made the opposite choices." The centerpiece of Python advocacy back in the day was this article by Eric Raymond: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 I know that's the article that convinced me to try Python. Everything he praised about Python screamed "opposite of Perl!" and after experiencing my mind rejecting Perl like a body rejecting a transplanted organ, I was desperate for an alternative that would make me as productive at scripting as the Perl gurus. (Yes, I'm still jealous of the one-liners.) So there is certainly room for a language to grow and become popular without having a first-class web framework. (These days any popular language will sprout a few web frameworks, but they don't have to become popular for the language to succeed.)

Splines 15y ago
Also IMO the ActiveState did alot to make perl & Python popular. Only in the last 10 years or so did ActivePython become really useful. In the last 90's it seemed (in my mind, at least) to play second fiddle to ActivePerl.