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This is because Python, by luck, ended up dominating the data science market. In this market you really want to shuffle tons of data quickly, and that’s usuall
by didip 5y ago
This is because Python, by luck, ended up dominating the data science market.
In this market you really want to shuffle tons of data quickly, and that’s usually achieved through parallelism.
Python multiprocess library does a poor job at that.
- anthk 5y agoThat's calling C and Fortran in the background, actually.
- Mehdi2277 5y agoThat’s a workaround that is not as ergonomic as writing python more directly. The person working on this Gil project is one of the major maintainers of a key ml library. They have used c/c++ binding approach but want to make life easier and be able to multi thread directly in python.
- mechanical_bear 5y agoBy luck? I think that is a bit reductionist.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoIt wasn't entirely Python's inborn merits. For example, we don't use the best language for each task today. Instead, we use whatever language our coworkers and other companies use, which we often convince ourselves is the best language for a task. The timing was critical, and although Python may be the Facebook of languages, one can't discount that it was extraordinarily lucky for Guido to be in the precise time and place to capitalize on good design choices.
- senderista 5y agoDitto with Ruby and web dev. The language was never designed with that application in mind (and very few people used it for that when I got into Ruby around 2000). Path dependence mostly accounts for the ubiquity of Python in science and Ruby in web dev; it just as easily could have gone the other way around.