4 ms·

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 "bet

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.)
    - trealira 2y ago
      > 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.) What you say here reminds me of something Peter Norvig said 15 years ago on this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 > Peter Norvig here. I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook. I found that Python was very nice for certain types of small problems, and had the libraries I needed to integrate with lots of other stuff, at Google and elsewhere on the net. Basically, that it's better pedagogically because it looks like pseudo-code and it's easy to get up and running quickly.
  - daedrdev 2y ago
    someone learning python as their first language knows so little its perfectly fine to let them pollute their global environment. Someone who knows other languages can understand what venv is for. Instead they can type python to open a shell and use python to immediately run their file.
    - throwawaymaths 2y ago
      > perfectly fine It's not, because you can fuck up system/unrelated app python dependencies and in extreme cases have to reinstall OS. Thankfully as developers migrate away from python/adopt strategies like flatpak this is less of a problem. Other PLs do not have this problem.
  - jyounker 2y ago
    It has become successful largely because it has always had really good foreign function interface. If you have a scientific or mathematical library laying around in C, then you could wire it up to Python, and then suddenly you have all the flexibility of a (fairly clean) scripting language to orchestrate your high speed C. Good examples of this are numpy and tensorflow.
    - throwawaymaths 2y ago
      tensorflow is atrocious, which is why it's basically dead in favor of (py)torch.
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    If someone is challenged figuring out a venv and they're not an absolute beginner, perhaps they aren't cut out to work in technology. There are countless subjects in the field more challenging and complicated to wrap one's brain around. Also, in 2025, just use uv.
    - throwawaymaths 2y ago
      > they're not an absolute beginner gp's claim is not "its easy to learn". It's not just the concept -- it's the ergonomics, absolutely terrible footguns (especially when dealing with global wheels that can screw up your running system), and the hidden state.
      - psunavy03 2y ago
        When would you want to interface between a specific project and the global Python environment running your system? If there's ever a time when "lock the project into a venv and don't cross-contaminate its dependencies with the global Python environment" isn't the answer, that sounds like a corner case. Let each project be its thing by itself.
  - skeledrew 2y ago
    Let me introduce you to uv[0]. And yes it does say something that this tool isn't written in Python, but I'd say there's even more to be said that so many are trying to support Python. [0] https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ https://docs.astral.sh/uv/
    - throwawaymaths 2y ago
      yeah the reason why that's not an answer is because another half of users will say use poetry. if you want to do bioinformatics, people will insist on conda. then your team will say "use rye" and these strategies are somewhat compatible but ultimately mutually incompatible in ways that will drive you mad every time you hit a tiny snag that nonetheless grinds your attempt to just fucking run code to a halt.
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.

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.)
  - trealira 2y ago
    > 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.) What you say here reminds me of something Peter Norvig said 15 years ago on this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 > Peter Norvig here. I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook. I found that Python was very nice for certain types of small problems, and had the libraries I needed to integrate with lots of other stuff, at Google and elsewhere on the net. Basically, that it's better pedagogically because it looks like pseudo-code and it's easy to get up and running quickly.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  someone learning python as their first language knows so little its perfectly fine to let them pollute their global environment. Someone who knows other languages can understand what venv is for. Instead they can type python to open a shell and use python to immediately run their file.
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    > perfectly fine It's not, because you can fuck up system/unrelated app python dependencies and in extreme cases have to reinstall OS. Thankfully as developers migrate away from python/adopt strategies like flatpak this is less of a problem. Other PLs do not have this problem.
- jyounker 2y ago
  It has become successful largely because it has always had really good foreign function interface. If you have a scientific or mathematical library laying around in C, then you could wire it up to Python, and then suddenly you have all the flexibility of a (fairly clean) scripting language to orchestrate your high speed C. Good examples of this are numpy and tensorflow.
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    tensorflow is atrocious, which is why it's basically dead in favor of (py)torch.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  If someone is challenged figuring out a venv and they're not an absolute beginner, perhaps they aren't cut out to work in technology. There are countless subjects in the field more challenging and complicated to wrap one's brain around. Also, in 2025, just use uv.
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    > they're not an absolute beginner gp's claim is not "its easy to learn". It's not just the concept -- it's the ergonomics, absolutely terrible footguns (especially when dealing with global wheels that can screw up your running system), and the hidden state.
    - psunavy03 2y ago
      When would you want to interface between a specific project and the global Python environment running your system? If there's ever a time when "lock the project into a venv and don't cross-contaminate its dependencies with the global Python environment" isn't the answer, that sounds like a corner case. Let each project be its thing by itself.
- skeledrew 2y ago
  Let me introduce you to uv[0]. And yes it does say something that this tool isn't written in Python, but I'd say there's even more to be said that so many are trying to support Python. [0] https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ https://docs.astral.sh/uv/
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    yeah the reason why that's not an answer is because another half of users will say use poetry. if you want to do bioinformatics, people will insist on conda. then your team will say "use rye" and these strategies are somewhat compatible but ultimately mutually incompatible in ways that will drive you mad every time you hit a tiny snag that nonetheless grinds your attempt to just fucking run code to a halt.

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.