4 ms·
By luck? I think that is a bit reductionist.
by mechanical_bear 5y ago
By 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.