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Back when I decided it was time to add a scripting language, Perl and Python seemed like the obvious choices, and in my mind were equally good options. I asked

Back when I decided it was time to add a scripting language, Perl and Python seemed like the obvious choices, and in my mind were equally good options. I asked my best friend which I should choose, and he more or less said, "You can't go wrong with either one, but when you ask for help Perl people are assholes and Python people are nice." I can't confirm his thoughts on Perl and I haven't interacted much with Ruby, but the Python community is definitely welcoming and patient in my experience. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a significant factor in Python's prevalence over Perl, Ruby, or anything else.

stevage 3y ago
Oh I have met Ruby people and it's a big factor in why I never learnt the language.
cutler 3y ago
I can't imagine Python's welcoming community has anything to do with it. If anything it was Ruby that had a reputation for being the most welcoming community with its MINASWAN (cringe) philosophy.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  I'm genuinely curious: what's "cringe" about MINASWAN? (I write mostly Python these days, but have been involved in both communities for a long time, and MINASWAN never particularly stood out to me other than as a cute reminder to be nice.)
  - cutler 3y ago
    It was meant tongue in cheek as I was defending Ruby being the most welcoming community. It's just a bit twee like the voice-over on London Underground - "See it, say it, sorted".
  - kaycey2022 3y ago
    There is no problem with someone being nice. It's only a problem when they want you to be nice exactly like them.
- twobitshifter 3y ago
  Maz (ruby author) is nice and so we are nice, isn’t so bad. It’s twee sounding but saying you are going to follow the example set by the founder is absolutely fine. Is it any worse than the Python ‘benevolent dictator for life’ example?
  - bb88 3y ago
    I'm going to answer your question directly: No, it's not worse. My interactions with Guido haven't been awesome. But the people put up with him regardless. The other people in python have been awesome.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > I can't imagine Python's welcoming community has anything to do with it. If anything it was Ruby that had a reputation for being the most welcoming community with its MINASWAN (cringe) philosophy. TBH, community had nothing to do with Python's enormous success over its competitors (Perl, and Ruby. Possibly Tcl too.). Nor did any technical merit, nor ergonomics. There's one, and only one, reason why Python exploded at the expense of the other competitors: The ease and acceptance of using the language as glue for C functions. Python's popularity is built on a solid foundation compatibility with C. If, in the 90s, C++ had taken off enough to displace C, I doubt Python would be as popular as it is. Python owes its ubiquity to C, because if C was not ubiquitous, Python wouldn't be either. (It's only recently, like the last 10 year or so, that I started seeing popular Python programs which didn't have a dependency on C libraries. And even now, it's still rare to see).
  - GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
    I don't think your analysis is accurate. My experience of trying to get my own C functions to use in Python to have been nightmarish. Yes, you can do it... if you have exactly the same compiler & version used to produce the python interpreter itself. C's only usefulness to Python is: it allows optimization of the 80/20 or 90/10 rule, so performance doesn't have to totally suck with Python. Python 'won' IMHO because it hit a sweet spot -- simple enough for beginners, in fact, beginner-friendly, but due to having a good basic set of datatypes (lists, tuples, sets, plus the usual ints, floats, and complex) -- this allowed complex ideas to be compactly expressed. The ability to switch between functional and imperative styles also helped. Python is a 'good enough' lisp. MIT switched, and Norvig has said as much. No, the astonishing thing is that Python survived the 2->3 transition, and came out stronger on the other end. Language cleanups, new 'syntactic sugar' (e.g. @ as the decorator syntax), and what you see is Python is trying to actively steal all the successful programming paradigms under one unified syntax. Is python perfect? Hardly. But it's beginner-friendly and expert-optimized. AND, unlike C++ (at least for me), you can get ALL of Python into your head at the same time. (Libraries, ok, but true in any language). In this specific sense, it is exactly like C (you can keep it all in your head, even the edge cases). There are newer languages gunning for a piece of Python's mindshare (Zig, Nim). But because Python is a moving target: getting better and better, the others will need to provide a spectacular use-case advantage --- and I just don't see that happening.
Stranger43 3y ago
yep the Perl community kind of had issues around the turn of the millennium and the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end. I don't think there was any toxicity in the Ruby community but it was made up of working programmers where as the big leading voices in the python community was teaching assistants and students so it might have been more tailored to newbies. I don't recall there being much real industrial use of python prior to Ruby emerging even if python is technically older so i think the real answer lies in why the educational sector decided that teaching python was easier and significant whitespace plays a huge part here.
- bb88 3y ago
  > I don't recall there being much real industrial use of python prior to Ruby emerging even if python is technically older Yeah that's my recollection too. About 2011ish there weren't a lot of jobs in python yet. Perhaps in SV, but not out in the real world. Several startups were doing it, including Youtube and google at the time. But in the F500 world, python wasn't used at all. I started using it in 2008/9-ish.
- rolandog 3y ago
  > [...] the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end. Not GP, but the Python 2 vs 3 holy wars were also something that kept me from adopting Python as a scripting language a couple of years.
  - bb88 3y ago
    Yeah, python 2->3 transition was painful. But, I would argue that was self inflicted. Guido and company chose not to develop a 2.8/2.9/etc series where people could move their code base over incrementally. I mean, I love python, but that sucked! Yes it would have been more work for the devs, but the amount of work it meant for the users were worse. In fact they pretty much just threw away anything before python 3.6 anyway now. Many things introduced in the 3.x series before 3.6 just don't work anymore (asyncio syntax being the notable one).
bluGill 3y ago
The only ruby person i've met was insistent that ruby was the one true way and he trued to force it into everything. That attitude turned me off. Of course I already knew Python, and so did the rest of my team so we had been doing tools in Python (the guy wasn't on my team), but until he pushed ruby into places where python would have been better (import a Python library rather than shell to out to a program) I was willing to accept it was probably fine '
- sodapopcan 3y ago
  > The only ruby person I've met was insistent that ruby was the one true way and he trued to force it into everything. That attitude turned me off. I mean, if you read almost any Elixir article that has hit the front page of HN, there are always comments from Pythonistas saying, "Why bother when there's Python?" Similar attitude. Obviously it's not everyone, but it's not everyone in the Ruby community either.
  - nindalf 3y ago
    It’s such a bizarre reason. “One person using something rubbed me the wrong way so I decided not to use it”. Did the person extrapolate to an entire community from a sample size of 1?
- hosh 3y ago
  Python and Ruby have some things where the intuitions are exactly inverted from one another. It took me a long time to figure out why Python rubbed me the wrong, and that if I dig up how I used to structure code in Pascal, it’s fine. Not that I care much these days since I prefer writing in Elixir.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  The only ruby person i've met was insistent that ruby was the one true way That sucks. I've been doing Ruby full-time since 2014 at 4 companies and I've never seen that sentiment, even from people who really love it. My experiences have been really positive.
truculent 3y ago
That’s funny because that’s one of the reasons I tend to point beginners to R instead of Python for data work.
Lammy 3y ago
> I haven't interacted much with Ruby “Matz is nice and so we are nice” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN :) The Rails community is another story, unfortunately.

stevage 3y ago

Oh I have met Ruby people and it's a big factor in why I never learnt the language.

cutler 3y ago

I can't imagine Python's welcoming community has anything to do with it. If anything it was Ruby that had a reputation for being the most welcoming community with its MINASWAN (cringe) philosophy.

woodruffw 3y ago
I'm genuinely curious: what's "cringe" about MINASWAN? (I write mostly Python these days, but have been involved in both communities for a long time, and MINASWAN never particularly stood out to me other than as a cute reminder to be nice.)
- cutler 3y ago
  It was meant tongue in cheek as I was defending Ruby being the most welcoming community. It's just a bit twee like the voice-over on London Underground - "See it, say it, sorted".
- kaycey2022 3y ago
  There is no problem with someone being nice. It's only a problem when they want you to be nice exactly like them.
twobitshifter 3y ago
Maz (ruby author) is nice and so we are nice, isn’t so bad. It’s twee sounding but saying you are going to follow the example set by the founder is absolutely fine. Is it any worse than the Python ‘benevolent dictator for life’ example?
- bb88 3y ago
  I'm going to answer your question directly: No, it's not worse. My interactions with Guido haven't been awesome. But the people put up with him regardless. The other people in python have been awesome.
lelanthran 3y ago
> I can't imagine Python's welcoming community has anything to do with it. If anything it was Ruby that had a reputation for being the most welcoming community with its MINASWAN (cringe) philosophy. TBH, community had nothing to do with Python's enormous success over its competitors (Perl, and Ruby. Possibly Tcl too.). Nor did any technical merit, nor ergonomics. There's one, and only one, reason why Python exploded at the expense of the other competitors: The ease and acceptance of using the language as glue for C functions. Python's popularity is built on a solid foundation compatibility with C. If, in the 90s, C++ had taken off enough to displace C, I doubt Python would be as popular as it is. Python owes its ubiquity to C, because if C was not ubiquitous, Python wouldn't be either. (It's only recently, like the last 10 year or so, that I started seeing popular Python programs which didn't have a dependency on C libraries. And even now, it's still rare to see).
- GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
  I don't think your analysis is accurate. My experience of trying to get my own C functions to use in Python to have been nightmarish. Yes, you can do it... if you have exactly the same compiler & version used to produce the python interpreter itself. C's only usefulness to Python is: it allows optimization of the 80/20 or 90/10 rule, so performance doesn't have to totally suck with Python. Python 'won' IMHO because it hit a sweet spot -- simple enough for beginners, in fact, beginner-friendly, but due to having a good basic set of datatypes (lists, tuples, sets, plus the usual ints, floats, and complex) -- this allowed complex ideas to be compactly expressed. The ability to switch between functional and imperative styles also helped. Python is a 'good enough' lisp. MIT switched, and Norvig has said as much. No, the astonishing thing is that Python survived the 2->3 transition, and came out stronger on the other end. Language cleanups, new 'syntactic sugar' (e.g. @ as the decorator syntax), and what you see is Python is trying to actively steal all the successful programming paradigms under one unified syntax. Is python perfect? Hardly. But it's beginner-friendly and expert-optimized. AND, unlike C++ (at least for me), you can get ALL of Python into your head at the same time. (Libraries, ok, but true in any language). In this specific sense, it is exactly like C (you can keep it all in your head, even the edge cases). There are newer languages gunning for a piece of Python's mindshare (Zig, Nim). But because Python is a moving target: getting better and better, the others will need to provide a spectacular use-case advantage --- and I just don't see that happening.

Stranger43 3y ago

yep the Perl community kind of had issues around the turn of the millennium and the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end. I don't think there was any toxicity in the Ruby community but it was made up of working programmers where as the big leading voices in the python community was teaching assistants and students so it might have been more tailored to newbies. I don't recall there being much real industrial use of python prior to Ruby emerging even if python is technically older so i think the real answer lies in why the educational sector decided that teaching python was easier and significant whitespace plays a huge part here.

bb88 3y ago
> I don't recall there being much real industrial use of python prior to Ruby emerging even if python is technically older Yeah that's my recollection too. About 2011ish there weren't a lot of jobs in python yet. Perhaps in SV, but not out in the real world. Several startups were doing it, including Youtube and google at the time. But in the F500 world, python wasn't used at all. I started using it in 2008/9-ish.
rolandog 3y ago
> [...] the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end. Not GP, but the Python 2 vs 3 holy wars were also something that kept me from adopting Python as a scripting language a couple of years.
- bb88 3y ago
  Yeah, python 2->3 transition was painful. But, I would argue that was self inflicted. Guido and company chose not to develop a 2.8/2.9/etc series where people could move their code base over incrementally. I mean, I love python, but that sucked! Yes it would have been more work for the devs, but the amount of work it meant for the users were worse. In fact they pretty much just threw away anything before python 3.6 anyway now. Many things introduced in the 3.x series before 3.6 just don't work anymore (asyncio syntax being the notable one).

bluGill 3y ago

The only ruby person i've met was insistent that ruby was the one true way and he trued to force it into everything. That attitude turned me off. Of course I already knew Python, and so did the rest of my team so we had been doing tools in Python (the guy wasn't on my team), but until he pushed ruby into places where python would have been better (import a Python library rather than shell to out to a program) I was willing to accept it was probably fine '

sodapopcan 3y ago
> The only ruby person I've met was insistent that ruby was the one true way and he trued to force it into everything. That attitude turned me off. I mean, if you read almost any Elixir article that has hit the front page of HN, there are always comments from Pythonistas saying, "Why bother when there's Python?" Similar attitude. Obviously it's not everyone, but it's not everyone in the Ruby community either.
- nindalf 3y ago
  It’s such a bizarre reason. “One person using something rubbed me the wrong way so I decided not to use it”. Did the person extrapolate to an entire community from a sample size of 1?
hosh 3y ago
Python and Ruby have some things where the intuitions are exactly inverted from one another. It took me a long time to figure out why Python rubbed me the wrong, and that if I dig up how I used to structure code in Pascal, it’s fine. Not that I care much these days since I prefer writing in Elixir.
JohnBooty 3y ago
The only ruby person i've met was insistent that ruby was the one true way That sucks. I've been doing Ruby full-time since 2014 at 4 companies and I've never seen that sentiment, even from people who really love it. My experiences have been really positive.

truculent 3y ago

That’s funny because that’s one of the reasons I tend to point beginners to R instead of Python for data work.

Lammy 3y ago

> I haven't interacted much with Ruby “Matz is nice and so we are nice” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN :) The Rails community is another story, unfortunately.