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I can see based on your perspective that you haven't collaborated with hundreds of STEM professionals, postdocs, or researchers. I can also see that your comme

I can see based on your perspective that you haven't collaborated with hundreds of STEM professionals, postdocs, or researchers. I can also see that your comment fails to address the meat of mine, despite being a reply to it. Python is extremely easy to get tasks done with, there's a minimal amount of ceremony and PLT background knowledge needed to program it. I love Perl, but explaining how $ and @ work differently given the point of usage is annoying, and if I taught Perl all day every day, it'd be a continuous annoyance. I don't have the studies and data to back up my opinion, but a lifetime of work has taught me the certainty that Python is one of the greatest languages ever created, that quite literally ANYBODY who can type and read English can learn to become effective with it, and that it blows every competitor out of the water by a large margin with regards to getting from Point A to Point B as a novice programmer. As more of the world becomes programmers, that facet alone cements Python's continued success and its place in PLT history. It's the human part of the language, not the object system or type theory or compiler internals or any of the esoteric technical bits. Nobody can teach someone to program in anything other than Python quicker than I could teach them to program in Python. But anyhow, this is well below my time to spend in a discussion like this. I mean this in the nicest way possible: I've probably spent more time teaching and training people who weren't programmers to write good programs then you've spent programming throughout your life. People who work in the White House, DARPA, the FDA, DOT, IRS, you name it. I know I can't PROVE my position, but time will. Python will always win eventually.

rykuno 4y ago
Honestly though, the original comment was just a plea for more competition to drive innovation it seems. Most of the data scientists I've worked with are programmer hobbyists as well. We've used Javascript/Python/Go/R. Maybe this will exist for people in that demographic, those who are data scientists that already are solid in programming. Regardless, more cool toys are good.
yellowapple 4y ago
> I can see based on your perspective that you haven't collaborated with hundreds of STEM professionals, postdocs, or researchers. Surely you know the saying about what happens when you ass-u-me. But hey, if that's the tone you'd like to set, then I'm happy to oblige... > I can also see that your comment fails to address the meat of mine There was no meat to yours. "Python is good for scientific uses because reasons and JS is not because reasons; also, here are some cheap shots at JS being a weekend project despite there having been literal decades of work since Brendan Eich invented it". That's the sort of drivel I'd expect from novices using tribalism as a substitute for an informed opinion, not someone who claims to have sufficient expertise in programming to competently educate someone else. > I love Perl, but explaining how $ and @ work differently given the point of usage is annoying, and if I taught Perl all day every day, it'd be a continuous annoyance. Explaining to beginners why their programs break if they don't get indentation perfectly right strikes me as no less of a continuous annoyance. On that note, Ruby lacks either of those issues. Same with Lua. Same with Javascript. > ANYBODY who can type and read English can learn to become effective with it That's true of pretty much every scripting language out there; that's indeed what usually sets scripting languages apart from systems languages. > it blows every competitor out of the water by a large margin with regards to getting from Point A to Point B as a novice programmer Not every competitor. It's one of a category of languages which novices in significant numbers successfully learn reasonably quickly - and significant numbers of novices do become successful with Ruby or Lua or - yes - JS just as quickly as novices do with Python. > I mean this in the nicest way possible: I've probably spent more time teaching and training people who weren't programmers to write good programs then you've spent programming throughout your life. I mean this in the nicest way possible: if your comments here are representative of your teaching and training of others, then you owe your students refunds and apologies. I would hope that you don't teach your students blatant misinformation like JS being merely a weekend project (as if Python wasn't?) or fanboyishly insist that "Python will always win eventually" as if programming is all about winners and losers rather than using the right tool for the job. If you do teach your students such, then they are worse off for it, and deserve someone who actually educates rather than misinforms. If you're as good a teacher as you claim to be, then the language doesn't matter; the differences between the various scripting languages out there are minute in comparison to the fundamental concepts like "how do I write and call functions?" or "how do I store data and use it later?". Likewise, to your average non-programmer, the language doesn't matter. What matters is the path of least resistance between "I need to do this thing" and "I have done this thing". Sometimes that's Python. Sometimes that's JS. Hell, sometimes that's something totally bonkers like Haskell. Python is one of several paths of least resistance for scientists in particular not because of anything to do with the language itself, but rather because of a library and tooling ecosystem that formed around it by happenstance; no reason why that couldn't happen for JS, or any other scripting language.
- crabmusket 4y ago
  > Hell, sometimes that's something totally bonkers like Haskell. This literally happened to me the other month. I had a tiny problem which I realised was a perfect fit for the List monad. Guess which language has the best support for that? I rewrote my little script in JS afterwards using flatMap, and it was much uglier.

rykuno 4y ago

Honestly though, the original comment was just a plea for more competition to drive innovation it seems. Most of the data scientists I've worked with are programmer hobbyists as well. We've used Javascript/Python/Go/R. Maybe this will exist for people in that demographic, those who are data scientists that already are solid in programming. Regardless, more cool toys are good.

yellowapple 4y ago

> I can see based on your perspective that you haven't collaborated with hundreds of STEM professionals, postdocs, or researchers. Surely you know the saying about what happens when you ass-u-me. But hey, if that's the tone you'd like to set, then I'm happy to oblige... > I can also see that your comment fails to address the meat of mine There was no meat to yours. "Python is good for scientific uses because reasons and JS is not because reasons; also, here are some cheap shots at JS being a weekend project despite there having been literal decades of work since Brendan Eich invented it". That's the sort of drivel I'd expect from novices using tribalism as a substitute for an informed opinion, not someone who claims to have sufficient expertise in programming to competently educate someone else. > I love Perl, but explaining how $ and @ work differently given the point of usage is annoying, and if I taught Perl all day every day, it'd be a continuous annoyance. Explaining to beginners why their programs break if they don't get indentation perfectly right strikes me as no less of a continuous annoyance. On that note, Ruby lacks either of those issues. Same with Lua. Same with Javascript. > ANYBODY who can type and read English can learn to become effective with it That's true of pretty much every scripting language out there; that's indeed what usually sets scripting languages apart from systems languages. > it blows every competitor out of the water by a large margin with regards to getting from Point A to Point B as a novice programmer Not every competitor. It's one of a category of languages which novices in significant numbers successfully learn reasonably quickly - and significant numbers of novices do become successful with Ruby or Lua or - yes - JS just as quickly as novices do with Python. > I mean this in the nicest way possible: I've probably spent more time teaching and training people who weren't programmers to write good programs then you've spent programming throughout your life. I mean this in the nicest way possible: if your comments here are representative of your teaching and training of others, then you owe your students refunds and apologies. I would hope that you don't teach your students blatant misinformation like JS being merely a weekend project (as if Python wasn't?) or fanboyishly insist that "Python will always win eventually" as if programming is all about winners and losers rather than using the right tool for the job. If you do teach your students such, then they are worse off for it, and deserve someone who actually educates rather than misinforms. If you're as good a teacher as you claim to be, then the language doesn't matter; the differences between the various scripting languages out there are minute in comparison to the fundamental concepts like "how do I write and call functions?" or "how do I store data and use it later?". Likewise, to your average non-programmer, the language doesn't matter. What matters is the path of least resistance between "I need to do this thing" and "I have done this thing". Sometimes that's Python. Sometimes that's JS. Hell, sometimes that's something totally bonkers like Haskell. Python is one of several paths of least resistance for scientists in particular not because of anything to do with the language itself, but rather because of a library and tooling ecosystem that formed around it by happenstance; no reason why that couldn't happen for JS, or any other scripting language.

crabmusket 4y ago
> Hell, sometimes that's something totally bonkers like Haskell. This literally happened to me the other month. I had a tiny problem which I realised was a perfect fit for the List monad. Guess which language has the best support for that? I rewrote my little script in JS afterwards using flatMap, and it was much uglier.