7 ms·

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

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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
    - nothrabannosir 1y ago
      Which is valid, but frustrating to see it lead to actual adoption outside of pedagogy. That property is entirely orthogonal to, almost at odds with, what makes a good programming language for medium to large production quality applications. If we used that logic elsewhere in life we’d all be playing the flute and cycling around on tricycles and balance bikes. But for some reason in tech it’s all about Hello World.
      - polotics 1y ago
        The story of the winner being scrapy market entrants that are lower-cost (...of learning, in the case of python) and good-enough-quality (...than OCaml, Lisps, Haskel, definitely not JS or Java) is not a new one. I don't subscribe to your analogies.
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    > You don't have to explain jargon-y keywords like "public" or "static" up front. patently not true. you dont get too far into python -- especially if you are reading (or copypastaing) other People's code -- before you see if __name__ == "__main__" and any potential future programmer will rightfully ask "what the absolute fuck is this" even "def" is kind of a weird fucking keyword. Don't get me started about teaching beginners which datatypes are pass by reference and which are pass by value. try explaining to an elementary school student why def foo(a): a = a + 1 doesn't change the caller's variable but def bar(a): a.append(1) does.
- daedrdev 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    tensorflow is atrocious, which is why it's basically dead in favor of (py)torch.
- psunavy03 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  - nothrabannosir 1y ago
    Which is valid, but frustrating to see it lead to actual adoption outside of pedagogy. That property is entirely orthogonal to, almost at odds with, what makes a good programming language for medium to large production quality applications. If we used that logic elsewhere in life we’d all be playing the flute and cycling around on tricycles and balance bikes. But for some reason in tech it’s all about Hello World.
    - polotics 1y ago
      The story of the winner being scrapy market entrants that are lower-cost (...of learning, in the case of python) and good-enough-quality (...than OCaml, Lisps, Haskel, definitely not JS or Java) is not a new one. I don't subscribe to your analogies.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  > You don't have to explain jargon-y keywords like "public" or "static" up front. patently not true. you dont get too far into python -- especially if you are reading (or copypastaing) other People's code -- before you see if __name__ == "__main__" and any potential future programmer will rightfully ask "what the absolute fuck is this" even "def" is kind of a weird fucking keyword. Don't get me started about teaching beginners which datatypes are pass by reference and which are pass by value. try explaining to an elementary school student why def foo(a): a = a + 1 doesn't change the caller's variable but def bar(a): a.append(1) does.
daedrdev 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  tensorflow is atrocious, which is why it's basically dead in favor of (py)torch.
psunavy03 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.