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Does Python or van Rossum really have anything interesting to say on the future of programming? Python has libraries and lots of users and hype, and those are r

by bmitc 4y ago

Does Python or van Rossum really have anything interesting to say on the future of programming? Python has libraries and lots of users and hype, and those are really its only outstanding "features". Python really does nothing interesting when I think of pushing the boundaries of programming.

williamstein 4y ago
And yet it is one of the top 10 most popular languages. There might be something to learn from the discipline and balance of not pushing the boundaries of programming too hard?
- bmitc 4y ago
  I don't think that conclusion follows. Yes, it's popular. No, Python is not disciplined nor balanced. Popularity is really more about social dynamics than anything.
  - camdenreslink 4y ago
    I don’t know about social dynamics unless you mean most programs in the world aren’t written by senior software engineers. Python is easy to understand to write a script or small web service. Scala or Haskell can never be the most popular for that exact reason.
doix 4y ago
It's worth pointing out that Python is 30ish years old at this point. It's "outstanding features" were creating a syntax that a lot of people can quickly grok (not just programmers) and the way they allowed for extensions to be written in C. I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things", in stark contrast with Perl; "there's more than one way to skin a cat". It's easy to look at this now and say that it's nothing interesting, because it already pushed the boundaries.
- tcmb 4y ago
  > I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things" It's one of the principles from the Zen of Python: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python#Principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python#Principles I agree with your comment, all of these taken together were a medium-sized revolution at the time. It's not for nothing that Python is the most popular language for teaching programming nowadays.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    I'm not sure they did to be honest. If I had to choose something to attribute the success of python to the general non-programmers i'd say jupyter notebooks are an order of magnitude more important than any of those things mentioned. Especially when the idea of there being one obvious way of doing things is contradicted in probably the most used package of pandas, and even built in things like list comprehensions vs loops vs itertools, then couple that with the way it does variable passing. Can't really agree that it is easier to read for laymen than other c-like languages of its day either, with the use of underscores for class methods and indentation defining scope. Honestly if I wanted to really know why python was successful interviews with the authors of the notebook, pandas and the AI libraries would be my targets, cause in my view they're the ones that made the language a success.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      > If I had to choose something to attribute the success of python to the general non-programmers i'd say jupyter notebooks are an order of magnitude more important than any of those things mentioned. Even then, Elixir notebooks with Livebook and F# notebooks with .NET Interactive (which are actually polyglot notebooks with several languages that can share data) are ahead of plain old Python notebooks.
  - imiric 4y ago
    The Zen of Python is not much more than a meme. As a nearby comment pointed out, Python doesn't follow it in many ways (explicit vs. implicit comes to mind), and it contradicts itself in several places. "Readability counts" might be the one exception, at least early on in the language's lifetime. Nowadays it could be argued that even that is diminishing. But readability is often overlooked by most programming languages, which is a mistake. Programmers (should) spend more time reading than writing code, so it's very important. It's also very difficult to get right, being so subjective, but GvR has a good eye for it, and he made good design choices to balance it with expressiveness. Readability is also crucial for a language being welcoming to newcomers, and new programmers in general. I think that Python is still the best first language for people learning to program. This is likely the biggest reason for its adoption and popularity today.
neilmock 4y ago
Python did introduce more love, kindness, and empathy into the world.
- remram 4y ago
  Did it? At this point what it's famous for is the 2-to-3 drama and the 20 competing packaging tools and standards.
  - europeanguy 4y ago
    Maybe the person you're responding to were taking a sarcastic shot at lex's schtick of making everything about love and empathy.
    - gjvc 4y ago
      While affecting the most miserable demeanor possible. Very odd.
sholladay 4y ago
Do you believe that AI / machine learning will play an increasingly important role in future technology? Because if so, Python is the go-to language for such work. Sure, some of that is due to human factors and not just language features, but Python makes AI and scientific computing easy and that work will influence Python’s development and vice versa. Personally, as long as I have a good linter, I prefer JavaScript for general purpose programming but there are some areas where other languages just dominate.
Qem 4y ago
I think just by inertia we will end with future languages copying Python syntax and spreading its influence, just like lots of languages copied C syntax after it got popular.
marcelr 4y ago
As someone who tries to design & implements languages on my own time I’ve learned 1 really important thing. Features don’t make a language good or important. Its the invisible broth the features live in that make them useful. The cohesive nature of python is something few languages can touch. The features in python though not always innovative by themselves work together like magic. Most people stuck in the initial hype phase of FP often miss these things, but python is special & shouldn’t be discarded because its lack of hyped features of the day.
- bmitc 4y ago
  > The cohesive nature of python is something few languages can touch. I am not sure I follow that at all. I have not known Python to be cohesive, like at all. Just look at how to do async/concurrency in Python. (a) you can't really, and (b) there are several ways to do with all sorts of quirks. > Most people stuck in the initial hype phase of FP often miss these things, but python is special & shouldn’t be discarded because its lack of hyped features of the day. People saying this usually just equate functional programming with Haskell. I know van Rossum does because he has said so himself. Functional-first programming, on the other hand, is a totally different ballgame. There isn't a hype phase there because such languages, like F# sit, in about the sweetest spot you can for programming languages. Also, the features Python lacks were around for at least a decade before it. It's not like they're just now the soup of the day.
Lutzb 4y ago
Somewhere I read a quote that has stuck with me: Python is not the number one language in any aspect, but it is often the second best language. This sums it up very nicely, I think. Without switching a language I can automate deployments, do machine learning tasks, implement ideas quickly, create backends, interface with most C libs easily and query apis.
- jtode 4y ago
  Yep - I had some issues on the last network I was responsible for which ended up being trivial to solve thanks to Python. In a world without it... there would be a language with the same features and a different name by now. It opens up the world to mediocre programmers.

by bmitc 4y ago

williamstein 4y ago

And yet it is one of the top 10 most popular languages. There might be something to learn from the discipline and balance of not pushing the boundaries of programming too hard?

bmitc 4y ago
I don't think that conclusion follows. Yes, it's popular. No, Python is not disciplined nor balanced. Popularity is really more about social dynamics than anything.
- camdenreslink 4y ago
  I don’t know about social dynamics unless you mean most programs in the world aren’t written by senior software engineers. Python is easy to understand to write a script or small web service. Scala or Haskell can never be the most popular for that exact reason.

doix 4y ago

It's worth pointing out that Python is 30ish years old at this point. It's "outstanding features" were creating a syntax that a lot of people can quickly grok (not just programmers) and the way they allowed for extensions to be written in C. I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things", in stark contrast with Perl; "there's more than one way to skin a cat". It's easy to look at this now and say that it's nothing interesting, because it already pushed the boundaries.

tcmb 4y ago
> I believe it also popularized the concept of "there should be one obvious way of doing things" It's one of the principles from the Zen of Python: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python#Principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python#Principles I agree with your comment, all of these taken together were a medium-sized revolution at the time. It's not for nothing that Python is the most popular language for teaching programming nowadays.
- philippejara 4y ago
  I'm not sure they did to be honest. If I had to choose something to attribute the success of python to the general non-programmers i'd say jupyter notebooks are an order of magnitude more important than any of those things mentioned. Especially when the idea of there being one obvious way of doing things is contradicted in probably the most used package of pandas, and even built in things like list comprehensions vs loops vs itertools, then couple that with the way it does variable passing. Can't really agree that it is easier to read for laymen than other c-like languages of its day either, with the use of underscores for class methods and indentation defining scope. Honestly if I wanted to really know why python was successful interviews with the authors of the notebook, pandas and the AI libraries would be my targets, cause in my view they're the ones that made the language a success.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    > If I had to choose something to attribute the success of python to the general non-programmers i'd say jupyter notebooks are an order of magnitude more important than any of those things mentioned. Even then, Elixir notebooks with Livebook and F# notebooks with .NET Interactive (which are actually polyglot notebooks with several languages that can share data) are ahead of plain old Python notebooks.
- imiric 4y ago
  The Zen of Python is not much more than a meme. As a nearby comment pointed out, Python doesn't follow it in many ways (explicit vs. implicit comes to mind), and it contradicts itself in several places. "Readability counts" might be the one exception, at least early on in the language's lifetime. Nowadays it could be argued that even that is diminishing. But readability is often overlooked by most programming languages, which is a mistake. Programmers (should) spend more time reading than writing code, so it's very important. It's also very difficult to get right, being so subjective, but GvR has a good eye for it, and he made good design choices to balance it with expressiveness. Readability is also crucial for a language being welcoming to newcomers, and new programmers in general. I think that Python is still the best first language for people learning to program. This is likely the biggest reason for its adoption and popularity today.

neilmock 4y ago

Python did introduce more love, kindness, and empathy into the world.

remram 4y ago
Did it? At this point what it's famous for is the 2-to-3 drama and the 20 competing packaging tools and standards.
- europeanguy 4y ago
  Maybe the person you're responding to were taking a sarcastic shot at lex's schtick of making everything about love and empathy.
  - gjvc 4y ago
    While affecting the most miserable demeanor possible. Very odd.

sholladay 4y ago

Do you believe that AI / machine learning will play an increasingly important role in future technology? Because if so, Python is the go-to language for such work. Sure, some of that is due to human factors and not just language features, but Python makes AI and scientific computing easy and that work will influence Python’s development and vice versa. Personally, as long as I have a good linter, I prefer JavaScript for general purpose programming but there are some areas where other languages just dominate.

Qem 4y ago

I think just by inertia we will end with future languages copying Python syntax and spreading its influence, just like lots of languages copied C syntax after it got popular.

marcelr 4y ago

As someone who tries to design & implements languages on my own time I’ve learned 1 really important thing. Features don’t make a language good or important. Its the invisible broth the features live in that make them useful. The cohesive nature of python is something few languages can touch. The features in python though not always innovative by themselves work together like magic. Most people stuck in the initial hype phase of FP often miss these things, but python is special & shouldn’t be discarded because its lack of hyped features of the day.

bmitc 4y ago
> The cohesive nature of python is something few languages can touch. I am not sure I follow that at all. I have not known Python to be cohesive, like at all. Just look at how to do async/concurrency in Python. (a) you can't really, and (b) there are several ways to do with all sorts of quirks. > Most people stuck in the initial hype phase of FP often miss these things, but python is special & shouldn’t be discarded because its lack of hyped features of the day. People saying this usually just equate functional programming with Haskell. I know van Rossum does because he has said so himself. Functional-first programming, on the other hand, is a totally different ballgame. There isn't a hype phase there because such languages, like F# sit, in about the sweetest spot you can for programming languages. Also, the features Python lacks were around for at least a decade before it. It's not like they're just now the soup of the day.

Lutzb 4y ago

Somewhere I read a quote that has stuck with me: Python is not the number one language in any aspect, but it is often the second best language. This sums it up very nicely, I think. Without switching a language I can automate deployments, do machine learning tasks, implement ideas quickly, create backends, interface with most C libs easily and query apis.

jtode 4y ago
Yep - I had some issues on the last network I was responsible for which ended up being trivial to solve thanks to Python. In a world without it... there would be a language with the same features and a different name by now. It opens up the world to mediocre programmers.