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Python is the most popular language on the planet because it’s a dynamic language, not in spite of it. If the type checker makes dynamic features difficult, dit

by j4mie 5y ago

Python is the most popular language on the planet because it’s a dynamic language, not in spite of it. If the type checker makes dynamic features difficult, ditch the type checker, not the dynamic features. I can’t wait for this pendulum to swing back the other way.

Tanjreeve 5y ago
Was there ever a point people were successfully building "backbone" systems in dynamically typed languages? I thought the pythons and Perl's of the world were always mainly doing scripts/interface applications.
- stevesimmons 5y ago
  See [1] for a PyData London talk I did on "Python at Massive Scale", about JPMorgan's Athena trading and risk management system, used for FX, Commodities, Credit, Equities, etc trading. At that time, Athena had 4,500 Python developers doing 20,000 commits a week. Also see one recent HN discussion on "An Oral History of Bank Python" [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047
  - Tanjreeve 5y ago
    Thank you this is super interesting having only heard vague hand waving about bank python. I'm still a bit dubious on it if you don't have the manpower budget to keep this kind of custom setup running but it's really interesting to know how it's done by people who do.
- zmmmmm 5y ago
  Dunno if you ever heard of this thing called Facebook ... but for a long time it was implemented almost entirely in PHP. The truth is, the argument that you cannot implement complex systems in dynamic languages has always been empirically fraught because there are so many counter examples. The problem is, even if static languages are "better" for such things, dynamic languages are certainly not bad enough at it to prevent them being successfully used for large scale systems.
lmm 5y ago
> Python is the most popular language on the planet because it’s a dynamic language, not in spite of it. Disagree. It's popular because it has an uncluttered syntax - "executable pseudocode" - and simple semantics - "explicit is better than implicit", "there should be one obvious way to do it", and all that. Metaclasses were never particularly Pythonic (if anything they felt like a more Ruby-style way of doing things, and the ascent of Python over Ruby is a reflection of that difference).

by j4mie 5y ago

Tanjreeve 5y ago

Was there ever a point people were successfully building "backbone" systems in dynamically typed languages? I thought the pythons and Perl's of the world were always mainly doing scripts/interface applications.

stevesimmons 5y ago
See [1] for a PyData London talk I did on "Python at Massive Scale", about JPMorgan's Athena trading and risk management system, used for FX, Commodities, Credit, Equities, etc trading. At that time, Athena had 4,500 Python developers doing 20,000 commits a week. Also see one recent HN discussion on "An Oral History of Bank Python" [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYD9yyMh9Hk [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047
- Tanjreeve 5y ago
  Thank you this is super interesting having only heard vague hand waving about bank python. I'm still a bit dubious on it if you don't have the manpower budget to keep this kind of custom setup running but it's really interesting to know how it's done by people who do.
zmmmmm 5y ago
Dunno if you ever heard of this thing called Facebook ... but for a long time it was implemented almost entirely in PHP. The truth is, the argument that you cannot implement complex systems in dynamic languages has always been empirically fraught because there are so many counter examples. The problem is, even if static languages are "better" for such things, dynamic languages are certainly not bad enough at it to prevent them being successfully used for large scale systems.

lmm 5y ago

> Python is the most popular language on the planet because it’s a dynamic language, not in spite of it. Disagree. It's popular because it has an uncluttered syntax - "executable pseudocode" - and simple semantics - "explicit is better than implicit", "there should be one obvious way to do it", and all that. Metaclasses were never particularly Pythonic (if anything they felt like a more Ruby-style way of doing things, and the ascent of Python over Ruby is a reflection of that difference).