5 ms·

Yes, what you did is strictly more powerful than what the Python people did. And you did it 20 years ago. Well done, have an upvote. And yet, here we are in 202

by tasuki 2y ago

Yes, what you did is strictly more powerful than what the Python people did. And you did it 20 years ago. Well done, have an upvote. And yet, here we are in 2025 with Python popularity growing unstoppably and (approximately) no one caring about OCaml (and all the other languages better than Python). It makes me sad.

sanderjd 2y ago
Network effects are a beast! But my two cents is that we're pretty lucky it's python that has taken off like a rocket. It's not my favorite language, but there are far worse that it could have been.
- psychoslave 2y ago
  You mean like Cobol? Oh wait!
rwmj 2y ago
I'm switching between C, OCaml, Python, bash & Rust roughly equally every day (to a lesser extent, Perl as well). Not everything is what gets on the front page of HN.
skeledrew 2y ago
It's interesting how the majority has explicitly chosen NOT to use the "better" languages. Is the majority really that bad in their judgment? Or is it that "better" is actually defined by adoption over time?
- daedrdev 2y ago
  It's clearly better in their opinion, they just aren't optimizing for the same metrics that you are. Python is better because it's easy for people to learn, imo.
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    its not easy to learn. its a challenge even getting it installed and running. what even is a venv? how do you explain that to a beginner? python is popular because its what teachers teach.
    - acdha 2y ago
      You don’t need to teach it to a beginner. The first of learning doesn’t need more than the standard library and when you need more than that you’re either giving them the single command necessary to run or, more likely, having them use a template project where a tool like Poetry is doing that automatically. What this usually hits isn’t that managing Python packages is hard in 2025 but that many people do not learn how their operating system works conceptually until the first time they learn to program and it’s easy to conflate that with the first language you learn.
      - throwawaymaths 2y ago
        > You don’t need to teach it to a beginner. gp's claim was: > Python is better because it's easy for people to learn, i believe then we agree: it is not.
    - zahlman 2y ago
      On modern Linux you can type `python` at the command prompt and get a REPL. On Windows you download an installer from the official website (just like one usually does to install anything on Windows), then use `py` at the command prompt. You don't need to `import` anything to start teaching Python. Even then you can do quite a lot with the standard library. Even then, unless you're using 3.11 or later on Linux you can let Pip install with `--user` until you actually need to isolate things between projects. (And even with new Python on Linux, the instructor can typically avert this by just installing a separate Python in `/usr/local/bin` for example. Yes, that's "cheating", depending on the classroom environment. But that's part of the point: installation hurdles are hurdles for self-learners, not for students.) You only need to learn about virtual environments once you have projects with mutually conflicting dependencies, and/or once you're at a point where you're ready to publish your own software and should be learning proper testing and development practices. (Which will be largely orthogonal to programming, and not trivial, in any language.) And when your students do get to that point, you can give them a link such as https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-environments https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-envi... . Teachers teach Python because it's easy to teach while still being relevant to the real world, in particular because boilerplate is minimized. You don't have to explain jargon-y keywords like "public" or "static" up front. You don't have to use classes for quite some time (if ever, really). You can express iteration naturally. Types are naturally thought of in terms of capabilities. In my mind, Python has all the pedagogical advantages of Lisp, plus enough syntactic cues to prevent getting "lost in a sea of parentheses". (Of course, it lacks plenty of other nice Lisp-family features.)
- dhruvrajvanshi 2y ago
  I think you're being too unfair. People aren't dumb. It's also about how much better. Beyond a decent enough type system, the advantages start to flatten and other factors start to matter more. Can't speak too much for python, but as someone who's written large amounts of code in OCaml and Typescript, the strictest compiler options for Typescript are good enough.
  - skeledrew 2y ago
    No, people aren't dumb. They're practical. And so they choose to do what is practical, which in this case is to choose Python. And, to me, that makes it the better language.
- angra_mainyu 2y ago
  momentum + ecosystem often play a much larger role than actual language merits.
  - skeledrew 2y ago
    And yet that momentum and ecosystem wouldn't have been achieved in the first place if there weren't enough merits in the language to trigger and maintain that interest.
    - angra_mainyu 2y ago
      I think the take should be a bit more nuanced. Some languages definitely had people gravitate towards them due to being innovative in a given space, but in many of those cases, the comparative advantage was lost to other languages/techs/frameworks that simply failed to gain a market share "equal to their innovative contribution" due to the first comer's advantage.

by tasuki 2y ago

sanderjd 2y ago

Network effects are a beast! But my two cents is that we're pretty lucky it's python that has taken off like a rocket. It's not my favorite language, but there are far worse that it could have been.

psychoslave 2y ago
You mean like Cobol? Oh wait!

rwmj 2y ago

I'm switching between C, OCaml, Python, bash & Rust roughly equally every day (to a lesser extent, Perl as well). Not everything is what gets on the front page of HN.

skeledrew 2y ago

It's interesting how the majority has explicitly chosen NOT to use the "better" languages. Is the majority really that bad in their judgment? Or is it that "better" is actually defined by adoption over time?

daedrdev 2y ago
It's clearly better in their opinion, they just aren't optimizing for the same metrics that you are. Python is better because it's easy for people to learn, imo.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  its not easy to learn. its a challenge even getting it installed and running. what even is a venv? how do you explain that to a beginner? python is popular because its what teachers teach.
  - acdha 2y ago
    You don’t need to teach it to a beginner. The first of learning doesn’t need more than the standard library and when you need more than that you’re either giving them the single command necessary to run or, more likely, having them use a template project where a tool like Poetry is doing that automatically. What this usually hits isn’t that managing Python packages is hard in 2025 but that many people do not learn how their operating system works conceptually until the first time they learn to program and it’s easy to conflate that with the first language you learn.
    - throwawaymaths 2y ago
      > You don’t need to teach it to a beginner. gp's claim was: > Python is better because it's easy for people to learn, i believe then we agree: it is not.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    On modern Linux you can type `python` at the command prompt and get a REPL. On Windows you download an installer from the official website (just like one usually does to install anything on Windows), then use `py` at the command prompt. You don't need to `import` anything to start teaching Python. Even then you can do quite a lot with the standard library. Even then, unless you're using 3.11 or later on Linux you can let Pip install with `--user` until you actually need to isolate things between projects. (And even with new Python on Linux, the instructor can typically avert this by just installing a separate Python in `/usr/local/bin` for example. Yes, that's "cheating", depending on the classroom environment. But that's part of the point: installation hurdles are hurdles for self-learners, not for students.) You only need to learn about virtual environments once you have projects with mutually conflicting dependencies, and/or once you're at a point where you're ready to publish your own software and should be learning proper testing and development practices. (Which will be largely orthogonal to programming, and not trivial, in any language.) And when your students do get to that point, you can give them a link such as https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-environments https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-envi... . Teachers teach Python because it's easy to teach while still being relevant to the real world, in particular because boilerplate is minimized. You don't have to explain jargon-y keywords like "public" or "static" up front. You don't have to use classes for quite some time (if ever, really). You can express iteration naturally. Types are naturally thought of in terms of capabilities. In my mind, Python has all the pedagogical advantages of Lisp, plus enough syntactic cues to prevent getting "lost in a sea of parentheses". (Of course, it lacks plenty of other nice Lisp-family features.)
dhruvrajvanshi 2y ago
I think you're being too unfair. People aren't dumb. It's also about how much better. Beyond a decent enough type system, the advantages start to flatten and other factors start to matter more. Can't speak too much for python, but as someone who's written large amounts of code in OCaml and Typescript, the strictest compiler options for Typescript are good enough.
- skeledrew 2y ago
  No, people aren't dumb. They're practical. And so they choose to do what is practical, which in this case is to choose Python. And, to me, that makes it the better language.
angra_mainyu 2y ago
momentum + ecosystem often play a much larger role than actual language merits.
- skeledrew 2y ago
  And yet that momentum and ecosystem wouldn't have been achieved in the first place if there weren't enough merits in the language to trigger and maintain that interest.
  - angra_mainyu 2y ago
    I think the take should be a bit more nuanced. Some languages definitely had people gravitate towards them due to being innovative in a given space, but in many of those cases, the comparative advantage was lost to other languages/techs/frameworks that simply failed to gain a market share "equal to their innovative contribution" due to the first comer's advantage.