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How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem? I have the feeling that its user base is pretty lopsided, but I mi

How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem? I have the feeling that its user base is pretty lopsided, but I might underestimate its importance in other areas, like teaching programming. I'd love to see a breakdown of its popularity by field.

TillE 4y ago
Very. Unless you're a diehard JavaScript head, it's still the language of choice for smallish projects like a Discord bot, or for any kind of sophisticated script.
shanebellone 4y ago
All the top tech companies use Python for product. Google Facebook + Instagram (largest deployment of Django) Spotify (millions of lines of Python) Netflix Reddit Dropbox (millions of lines of Python) YouTube Plenty more examples.
- mihaaly 4y ago
  All those use dozens (hundreds?) of other tech for product too. How is this an answer to the question?
  - shanebellone 4y ago
    "How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem?" ... do I really need to explain this?
    - mihaaly 4y ago
      Yes. P used for something in places in parallel of hundreds of (several exotic, rarely used) technologies is not really predicting how much P was used without scientific and ML uses. What if P is mostly used for scientific and ML purposes in those places, or as an experiment, study, not necessarily being a backbone? Or with other secondary agenda, overstated, etc. The mere fact that P is used in a huge amalgam of A,B,C,... tells very little alone concerning the question. Almost nothing. Yes, needs some unwrapping what you believe.
      - shanebellone 4y ago
        It's not solely used for scientific and machine learning at any of the aforementioned companies. It is the (or was) chosen by a number of technology companies who have the resources and knowledge to select the correct languages to address one or more of their existing problems. That is evidence of use and use case. I would argue moving away from Python at global scale doesn't even negate my point. All products change with scale.
        mihaaly 4y ago
        Agreed. And sur, shouldn't move away. The whole matter is a hypothetical thing anyway.
- theCrowing 4y ago
  It's also the primary language used for everything regarding VFX. Think Pixar, ILM, WETA, Disney etc. it's mostly inhouse tools so nobody ever sees them but the code bases are huge and are growing as fast as the demand for more and more high quality VFX from streaming services and studios.
  - shanebellone 4y ago
    That's interesting. I wasn't aware of this. Thanks for the share.
  - Simran-B 4y ago
    Now that you say VFX, Python is indeed heavily used in this industry. It's used in internal tooling but many of the open-sourced projects under the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) umbrella also have a Python interface. Python is also popular among color scientists, of which many work in VFX it seems. By the way, the industry also makes heavy use of Qt, also in combination with Python, to quickly build production tools with a GUI.
- rrdharan 4y ago
  Google / YouTube no longer use Python “for product”, at least, not in the serving path. Dropbox has also been moving away and towards Golang. Instagram (Cinder), Google (Unladen Swallow) and Dropbox (Pyston) have also all experimented with heavy engineering investment trying to improve Python performance and only one of them (Cinder) has outcompeted the “just rewrite it in a faster language” strategy.
  - shanebellone 4y ago
    Also... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-311-faster-cpython-team/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-311-faster-cpyt...
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    I think it's a great pattern to start with Python and do something once performance becomes a problem. You can afford it when you're successful thanks to the code you wrote in Python, or it won't be a problem anyway.
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    Reddit is also transitioning away to Go, and Netflix is not a Python shop, they're far more Java with some Node.
    - shanebellone 4y ago
      Netflix uses Python for their recommendation engine, correct?
      - reducesuffering 4y ago
        > How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem?
baq 4y ago
> How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem? That’s tail wagging the dog. ‘Why Python became the scientific computing language?’ is the right question.
- college_physics 4y ago
  This. Somebody should actually trace the milestones that led to the current state as it not by any means obvious why it happened. At some point a winner-takes-all dynamic obscured some direct competitors like R or julia but prior to that all bets were open. It could also have been c++, since libraries like armadillo and eigen make it easy to write script-like code. Or even java that is everywhere in enterprize
  - syockit 4y ago
    Julia came too late to the scene. When I first started using Julia 0.3, there was already Theano for Python, and Tensorflow was in the making. R for some reason is not as easily navigable as Python. The slowness of compiling Armadillo and Eigen makes it a no-go for iterating on new ideas. Maybe it should be asked instead why Octave didn't take hold, as Matlab is popular among engineering communities and the syntax is also simple enough to understand.
- Simran-B 4y ago
  > Why Python became the scientific computing language? Some guesses: - Because scientists aren't that much into programming and Python is one of the easier languages to start with? - Some aspects of its language design, like the syntax for slices, making it easy to express often used operations in a rather intuitive way? - The two points above leading to the numpy project, enabling high-volume computations with a friendly programming language? - Maybe Jupyter Notebooks played a role as well? It's a great teaching tool.
__marvin_the__ 4y ago
Here's the link for Jetbrains survey results last year. There's web dev (django perhaps), dev ops and sys ad, education, and software testing. https://lp.jetbrains.com/python-developers-survey-2021/ https://lp.jetbrains.com/python-developers-survey-2021/

TillE 4y ago

Very. Unless you're a diehard JavaScript head, it's still the language of choice for smallish projects like a Discord bot, or for any kind of sophisticated script.

shanebellone 4y ago

All the top tech companies use Python for product. Google Facebook + Instagram (largest deployment of Django) Spotify (millions of lines of Python) Netflix Reddit Dropbox (millions of lines of Python) YouTube Plenty more examples.

mihaaly 4y ago
All those use dozens (hundreds?) of other tech for product too. How is this an answer to the question?
- shanebellone 4y ago
  "How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem?" ... do I really need to explain this?
  - mihaaly 4y ago
    Yes. P used for something in places in parallel of hundreds of (several exotic, rarely used) technologies is not really predicting how much P was used without scientific and ML uses. What if P is mostly used for scientific and ML purposes in those places, or as an experiment, study, not necessarily being a backbone? Or with other secondary agenda, overstated, etc. The mere fact that P is used in a huge amalgam of A,B,C,... tells very little alone concerning the question. Almost nothing. Yes, needs some unwrapping what you believe.
    - shanebellone 4y ago
      It's not solely used for scientific and machine learning at any of the aforementioned companies. It is the (or was) chosen by a number of technology companies who have the resources and knowledge to select the correct languages to address one or more of their existing problems. That is evidence of use and use case. I would argue moving away from Python at global scale doesn't even negate my point. All products change with scale.
      - mihaaly 4y ago
        Agreed. And sur, shouldn't move away. The whole matter is a hypothetical thing anyway.
theCrowing 4y ago
It's also the primary language used for everything regarding VFX. Think Pixar, ILM, WETA, Disney etc. it's mostly inhouse tools so nobody ever sees them but the code bases are huge and are growing as fast as the demand for more and more high quality VFX from streaming services and studios.
- shanebellone 4y ago
  That's interesting. I wasn't aware of this. Thanks for the share.
- Simran-B 4y ago
  Now that you say VFX, Python is indeed heavily used in this industry. It's used in internal tooling but many of the open-sourced projects under the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) umbrella also have a Python interface. Python is also popular among color scientists, of which many work in VFX it seems. By the way, the industry also makes heavy use of Qt, also in combination with Python, to quickly build production tools with a GUI.
rrdharan 4y ago
Google / YouTube no longer use Python “for product”, at least, not in the serving path. Dropbox has also been moving away and towards Golang. Instagram (Cinder), Google (Unladen Swallow) and Dropbox (Pyston) have also all experimented with heavy engineering investment trying to improve Python performance and only one of them (Cinder) has outcompeted the “just rewrite it in a faster language” strategy.
- shanebellone 4y ago
  Also... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-311-faster-cpython-team/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-311-faster-cpyt...
- solarkraft 4y ago
  I think it's a great pattern to start with Python and do something once performance becomes a problem. You can afford it when you're successful thanks to the code you wrote in Python, or it won't be a problem anyway.
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  Reddit is also transitioning away to Go, and Netflix is not a Python shop, they're far more Java with some Node.
  - shanebellone 4y ago
    Netflix uses Python for their recommendation engine, correct?
    - reducesuffering 4y ago
      > How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem?

baq 4y ago

> How popular would Python be without the scientific users and the machine learning ecosystem? That’s tail wagging the dog. ‘Why Python became the scientific computing language?’ is the right question.

college_physics 4y ago
This. Somebody should actually trace the milestones that led to the current state as it not by any means obvious why it happened. At some point a winner-takes-all dynamic obscured some direct competitors like R or julia but prior to that all bets were open. It could also have been c++, since libraries like armadillo and eigen make it easy to write script-like code. Or even java that is everywhere in enterprize
- syockit 4y ago
  Julia came too late to the scene. When I first started using Julia 0.3, there was already Theano for Python, and Tensorflow was in the making. R for some reason is not as easily navigable as Python. The slowness of compiling Armadillo and Eigen makes it a no-go for iterating on new ideas. Maybe it should be asked instead why Octave didn't take hold, as Matlab is popular among engineering communities and the syntax is also simple enough to understand.
Simran-B 4y ago
> Why Python became the scientific computing language? Some guesses: - Because scientists aren't that much into programming and Python is one of the easier languages to start with? - Some aspects of its language design, like the syntax for slices, making it easy to express often used operations in a rather intuitive way? - The two points above leading to the numpy project, enabling high-volume computations with a friendly programming language? - Maybe Jupyter Notebooks played a role as well? It's a great teaching tool.

__marvin_the__ 4y ago

Here's the link for Jetbrains survey results last year. There's web dev (django perhaps), dev ops and sys ad, education, and software testing. https://lp.jetbrains.com/python-developers-survey-2021/ https://lp.jetbrains.com/python-developers-survey-2021/