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That article is very strange. All the weaknesses it lists have been around since the start. And how exactly have they impeded Python's growth till now? There a

That article is very strange. All the weaknesses it lists have been around since the start. And how exactly have they impeded Python's growth till now? There are genuine issues with Python: no mobile story (but how many other languages do?), and distribution is harder than it needs to be. The second is getting some attention, hopefully it'll be better soon.

nuclearnice1 5y ago
> And how exactly have they impeded Python's growth till now? Hard to be *exact* but presumably they have impeded growth in mobile? Swift has a 2% market share according to Google. Probably some performance people have migrated to rust or julia or stayed with the C family too?
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I'm having a hard time seeing failure to take over mobile as a serious problem, any more than I see it as a serious problem that I can't take people waterskiing with my bicycle. I would even argue that many of the things that make my bike a terrible watercraft also happen to make it great as a light terrestrial vehicle. It's just possible that not every thing needs to be everything.
  - nuclearnice1 5y ago
    Does the wonderful bicycle analogy have grounding in the experience of Python? Are there things about Python that make it great as a general programming languages, but not for mobile. Perhaps the ease with which people reach for libs that wrap C? I dunno.
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      For starters, being just-in-time compiled makes for a nice short feedback cycle when you're developing. That's great for scripting, data science, exploratory development, even Web development since it facilitates a nice hot code reloading experience. But it also completely disqualifies it from running on iOS, which enforces a (understandable, IMO) ban on JITing. I'm not interested in arguing about the relative merits of dynamic typing in any sort of absolute sense, but I will say that there are a lot of use cases where I like it, and they happen to overlap nicely with Python's core use cases. But they're also a problem on mobile, where you're more resource-constrained, including having to worry about battery usage. All that pointer chasing does have a cost. On the other hand, non-GC languages like C, Rust and Swift make sense on mobile, where you want consistently low UI latency and you're trying to keep memory usage down. But there are lots of back-end development scenarios where I'd rather not have to think much about memory.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Kivy does all these things, although it is short on developers.

nuclearnice1 5y ago

> And how exactly have they impeded Python's growth till now? Hard to be *exact* but presumably they have impeded growth in mobile? Swift has a 2% market share according to Google. Probably some performance people have migrated to rust or julia or stayed with the C family too?

mumblemumble 5y ago
I'm having a hard time seeing failure to take over mobile as a serious problem, any more than I see it as a serious problem that I can't take people waterskiing with my bicycle. I would even argue that many of the things that make my bike a terrible watercraft also happen to make it great as a light terrestrial vehicle. It's just possible that not every thing needs to be everything.
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  Does the wonderful bicycle analogy have grounding in the experience of Python? Are there things about Python that make it great as a general programming languages, but not for mobile. Perhaps the ease with which people reach for libs that wrap C? I dunno.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    For starters, being just-in-time compiled makes for a nice short feedback cycle when you're developing. That's great for scripting, data science, exploratory development, even Web development since it facilitates a nice hot code reloading experience. But it also completely disqualifies it from running on iOS, which enforces a (understandable, IMO) ban on JITing. I'm not interested in arguing about the relative merits of dynamic typing in any sort of absolute sense, but I will say that there are a lot of use cases where I like it, and they happen to overlap nicely with Python's core use cases. But they're also a problem on mobile, where you're more resource-constrained, including having to worry about battery usage. All that pointer chasing does have a cost. On the other hand, non-GC languages like C, Rust and Swift make sense on mobile, where you want consistently low UI latency and you're trying to keep memory usage down. But there are lots of back-end development scenarios where I'd rather not have to think much about memory.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Kivy does all these things, although it is short on developers.