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Python was developed in the late 80's and first released in 1991 - it's been around awhile. One of the things that always made it useful before it became so pop
by taylodl 3y ago
Python was developed in the late 80's and first released in 1991 - it's been around awhile. One of the things that always made it useful before it became so popular is its great interop with C/C++.
Ultimately that interop led to NumPy and SciPy, which allowed you to use a rather simple language and yet get high performance when doing calculations. That, as they say, was that.
It doesn't hurt that Python is a multi paradigm language - unlike many of the other popular languages today demanding a particular mindset for programming. You want to do structural programming? Fine. Object-oriented? That's fine too. A little bit of functional (lite)? There's some limited capabilities for that too.
Add in 30 years of Java JIT compilation optimizations that's been applied to Python interpreted code, C/C++ interop - Python is a simple, yet powerful language. That's why it's become so popular.
- krackers 3y ago>Java JIT compilation optimizations that's been applied to Python interpreted code I thought CPython doesn't JIT at all? What optimizations are you referring to
- taylodl 3y agoPyPy and IronPython
- colinsane 3y agoi don’t know enough about Ruby, but if it’s true that Python had better C interop early on then roll the clock forward and that should explain an underappreciated amount of the difference. why are so many Gtk apps written in Python? because `from gi.repository import <my_c_library>` gets you bindings to any gobject C library without extra work for the library authors or the library users. if that sort of thing’s existed for a long time, then yeah: Python’s gonna end up more integrated with the C-heavy computing environment of the era than any language that doesn’t bind so easily.