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I don't think people use Python because it's fast. It gained momentum because it has good libraries for data science and ML. Other languages, including JS, are

I don't think people use Python because it's fast. It gained momentum because it has good libraries for data science and ML. Other languages, including JS, are far faster at this point. However, the reason to use JS in particular is because when you have a lot of I/O blocking calls (DB calls, web requests) it really is a lot faster. But if you do anything with numbers, JS is the wrong language - it's so limited here that it's almost laughable. Same with dates. That makes it a very bad choice for data science.

ahartmetz 3y ago
> It gained momentum because it has good libraries for data science and ML That's pretty far from a root cause though. I'd say it has these because - get this - it's actually a quite nice language to work with, so some people prefer it, and other people can handle it, unlike more difficult languages. In particular, Python is fairly small / minimalist (though the cruft is accumulating...), straightforward and powerful. That is somehow barely mentioned among all the performance complaints. Me, usually writing C++, I like it for writing various little helper tools. No deep notebook tensors are involved in that work. It's mostly file and string processing, in one case also a GUI and Excel (unfortunately) tables.