6 ms·

From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins. It started gaining more traction when Canonical adopted it as the main lan

by pyman 1y ago

From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins. It started gaining more traction when Canonical adopted it as the main language for Ubuntu 4.10 in 2004. Then, in 2005, Guido van Rossum was hired by Google to work on Google Cloud. That opened the door for wider adoption in academia, since Python had strong math libraries and integrated well with tools researchers were already using, like Hadoop, right around the time big data and ML were starting to take off. Also, between 2005 and 2006, two important things happened: Ruby on Rails came out and inspired Django, which was starting to gain popularity, and web developers were getting tired of Perl's messy syntax. That's how Python quickly became a solid choice not just for server-side scripts, but for building proper web apps. In the meantime, another language that could be embedded directly into HTML was storming the web: PHP. Its syntax was similar to JavaScript, it was easy to pick up, lowered the barrier to entry for software development, worked straight out of the box, and didn't require thousands of print statements to get things done. The 3 Ps made history. According to programmers from 20 years ago, they were like religions. Each had its own philosophy and a loyal group of followers crusading online, getting into heated debates, all trying to win over more adopters. The new generation of devs is more pragmatic. These days it's less about language wars and more about picking the right tool for the job.

darkstar_16 1y ago
> These days it's less about language wars and more about picking the right tool for the job You should talk to the Java advocates in my company :) The language wars are still around, it's just Java vs the rest now.
- pyman 1y ago
  One of my colleagues, a retired programmer who spent 20 years at Microsoft, told my students that it used to be Java vs Visual Basic, until Microsoft brought in the big guns, like Anders Hejlsberg. That's when it turned into Java vs .NET, and things really started to heat up :)
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Java unequivocally won the war, though.
    - adw 1y ago
      C# is the Java of Lua (thanks to Unity) which will never not be weird.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      Having used both, I still can't understand why.
      - pzo 1y ago
        M$ was too late to open source it and too late to embrace Linux. On desktop side .NET was only for windows back then and xamarin immature. On server side in java land you had framework war so you had many choices and libraries to choose from - companies didn't want to fully embrace M$ ecosystem (windows sql server, windows deployment etc). Then Android came and adopted Java and M$ lost mobile ecosystem war. I can see similar way why Swift eventually can loose market share - too late to open source and too late to embrace cross-platform.
tgv 1y ago
Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses. They all switched to Python, because you have to explain less. I don't think I heard about web servers in Python before 2012. I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly. PHP's popularity isn't really from 2005-2006. It was popular at the end of the 90s, and it looks like JS as much as it looks like a potato.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  With python you can just go: 'print "hello, world!"' and that's a full-ass program You run it by saying `python hello.py`. Compare that to the amount of crap you need(ed) with 2005 Java just to have something running. The shittiness of ActivePython and generally getting python to run on Windows were a bit of a hurdle, but still it was easier than the competition
  - taeric 1y ago
    I mean, it isn't like you couldn't get similarly terse scripts in other languages. Common LISP, as an easy example people love to beat up on.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    You could, but then they deprecated the paranthesis less form in 3.x :)
  - icedchai 1y ago
    Sure, but you could've done the same thing with perl in the 80's and 90's.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      You could also accidentally summon an Ancient One while trying to write a regex :D Perl is a fine language, but it's like using a wood chipper with no safeties. It takes extreme care and know-how to use it without splattering ASCII everywhere and making an unmaintainable write-only mess. For every beautiful and maintainable perl program (mostly irssi scripts) I've seen 99 abominations that are quicker to rewrite completely than decode wtf they are doing.
stevesimmons 1y ago
The key factor imo was Travis Oliphant merging the competing numeric and numarray libraries into numpy in 2005. That quickly became the foundation of Python as the key environment for open source numeric processing. It brought across a ton of users from R and Matlab. Pandas, Matplotlib and ScikitLearn then consolidated Python's place as the platform of choice for both academic and commercial ML.
troad 1y ago
> According to programmers from 20 years ago, they were like religions. Each had its own philosophy and a loyal group of followers crusading online, getting into heated debates, all trying to win over more adopters. It's very weird reading something you lived through described in these terms, as though it were being described by an anthropologist. Can't help but wonder what the future will have to say about today. "In 2025, programmers used 'frameworks' to hang 'apps' from some kind of 'web'. They believed these frameworks gave them magic powers. Many even fought in 'flame wars' on this topic, which experts believe involved the use of fire to destroy webs woven by competing programmers."
Twirrim 1y ago
> The 3 Ps made history. According to programmers from 20 years ago, they were like religions. Each had its own philosophy and a loyal group of followers crusading online, getting into heated debates, all trying to win over more adopters. The new generation of devs is more pragmatic. These days it's less about language wars and more about picking the right tool for the job. I feel like the religious wars aspects of this is completely overblown. The conversations around languages really hasn't changed all that much in the last 20 years. Look at the way you see things happening in HN, heck even in the comment thread right here. It's the exact same kinds of discussions as happened back 20 years ago, with exactly the same kind of pragmatism. I think the gulf comes about from the fact that the primary sources are conversations occurring between people that are largely anonymous behind an online handle, interacting with people that aren't face to face. There's always been an element of exaggeration in the interactions. What might be a "Umm, no" with a maybe a shake of the head, becomes "Your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries". Almost every party involved comes to recognise the particular cultural quirks (which varied from forum to forum) and how to translate what was said, to what was actually meant.
adw 1y ago
Python was everywhere in science by earlier than that (Numeric and numarray, Numpy’s predecessors, are from the late 90s/early 2000s).
spiderxxxx 1y ago
>From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins. Yea, I was a sysadmin around 2000 (before that too) and I knew it as such. >between 2005 and 2006, two important things happened: Somewhat - I used it in 2001 for Plone which is based on Zope, which was somewhat popular around that time. Writing all the web stuff with Python made sense, since Plone provided a CMS and could include a wiki. Adding on some sql calls to it in python just made sense. The competition was between PHP and Python, though there were some other less popular choices. Ruby on Rails definitely was getting a lot more popular around those times. PHP didn't start getting popular around 2005, if anything, people started using Python more, and started criticizing the crappy code that was circulating in the PHP community. In any case, it was a fun time, but what's the point of looking back like that?
snapetom 1y ago
This aligns with what I remember and Guido going to Google explains things. Mid 2000's was all about PHP (Cake/Symphony/CodeIgniter/etc) vs Ruby (Rails) in the open source world. I remember hearing about Python only in sysadmin work and Plone. Then, suddenly were suddenly a lot of articles from Google about just about everything, all in Python. I remember saying to a coworker, "Google is single-handedly keeping Python alive." Then bam. It was everywhere. Mid 2010's, I took a cybersec job and they told me to learn Python in the two weeks between accepting and starting. "Python is all over cybersec," I was told. It was then I realized Python took over academia, which positioned it perfectly for ML. It's features made it easy to start, but it also benefited from right place, right time.
- pyman 1y ago
  Guido's passion and leadership were the driving force behind Python. A lot of smart people aligned with his vision.
BiteCode_dev 1y ago
I'd say the switch was learning that Google Search was written in Python (remember when error pages URL were in .py ?), and Youtube rewritten in Python. After that, reddit and dropbox followed (and later Instagram). Apple also added Python in, I think, Mac OS X Jaguar, so it blipped on the radar. When you have big players using it, the community automatically grows. Django was the continuity of that and definitely contributed to the growing popularity of Python, but I think the hype started way before (and in fact we had to suffer Zope/Plone/Twisted for it :)). Another decisive date was circa 2010 when the Belgian book "learn programming with python" came out. Granted, Django was already 5 years old at the time, but it brought many beginners who knew nothing about programming at the time.

by pyman 1y ago

darkstar_16 1y ago

> These days it's less about language wars and more about picking the right tool for the job You should talk to the Java advocates in my company :) The language wars are still around, it's just Java vs the rest now.

pyman 1y ago
One of my colleagues, a retired programmer who spent 20 years at Microsoft, told my students that it used to be Java vs Visual Basic, until Microsoft brought in the big guns, like Anders Hejlsberg. That's when it turned into Java vs .NET, and things really started to heat up :)
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Java unequivocally won the war, though.
  - adw 1y ago
    C# is the Java of Lua (thanks to Unity) which will never not be weird.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    Having used both, I still can't understand why.
    - pzo 1y ago
      M$ was too late to open source it and too late to embrace Linux. On desktop side .NET was only for windows back then and xamarin immature. On server side in java land you had framework war so you had many choices and libraries to choose from - companies didn't want to fully embrace M$ ecosystem (windows sql server, windows deployment etc). Then Android came and adopted Java and M$ lost mobile ecosystem war. I can see similar way why Swift eventually can loose market share - too late to open source and too late to embrace cross-platform.

tgv 1y ago

Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses. They all switched to Python, because you have to explain less. I don't think I heard about web servers in Python before 2012. I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly. PHP's popularity isn't really from 2005-2006. It was popular at the end of the 90s, and it looks like JS as much as it looks like a potato.

theshrike79 1y ago
With python you can just go: 'print "hello, world!"' and that's a full-ass program You run it by saying `python hello.py`. Compare that to the amount of crap you need(ed) with 2005 Java just to have something running. The shittiness of ActivePython and generally getting python to run on Windows were a bit of a hurdle, but still it was easier than the competition
- taeric 1y ago
  I mean, it isn't like you couldn't get similarly terse scripts in other languages. Common LISP, as an easy example people love to beat up on.
- nottorp 1y ago
  You could, but then they deprecated the paranthesis less form in 3.x :)
- icedchai 1y ago
  Sure, but you could've done the same thing with perl in the 80's and 90's.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    You could also accidentally summon an Ancient One while trying to write a regex :D Perl is a fine language, but it's like using a wood chipper with no safeties. It takes extreme care and know-how to use it without splattering ASCII everywhere and making an unmaintainable write-only mess. For every beautiful and maintainable perl program (mostly irssi scripts) I've seen 99 abominations that are quicker to rewrite completely than decode wtf they are doing.

stevesimmons 1y ago

The key factor imo was Travis Oliphant merging the competing numeric and numarray libraries into numpy in 2005. That quickly became the foundation of Python as the key environment for open source numeric processing. It brought across a ton of users from R and Matlab. Pandas, Matplotlib and ScikitLearn then consolidated Python's place as the platform of choice for both academic and commercial ML.

troad 1y ago

> According to programmers from 20 years ago, they were like religions. Each had its own philosophy and a loyal group of followers crusading online, getting into heated debates, all trying to win over more adopters. It's very weird reading something you lived through described in these terms, as though it were being described by an anthropologist. Can't help but wonder what the future will have to say about today. "In 2025, programmers used 'frameworks' to hang 'apps' from some kind of 'web'. They believed these frameworks gave them magic powers. Many even fought in 'flame wars' on this topic, which experts believe involved the use of fire to destroy webs woven by competing programmers."

Twirrim 1y ago

> The 3 Ps made history. According to programmers from 20 years ago, they were like religions. Each had its own philosophy and a loyal group of followers crusading online, getting into heated debates, all trying to win over more adopters. The new generation of devs is more pragmatic. These days it's less about language wars and more about picking the right tool for the job. I feel like the religious wars aspects of this is completely overblown. The conversations around languages really hasn't changed all that much in the last 20 years. Look at the way you see things happening in HN, heck even in the comment thread right here. It's the exact same kinds of discussions as happened back 20 years ago, with exactly the same kind of pragmatism. I think the gulf comes about from the fact that the primary sources are conversations occurring between people that are largely anonymous behind an online handle, interacting with people that aren't face to face. There's always been an element of exaggeration in the interactions. What might be a "Umm, no" with a maybe a shake of the head, becomes "Your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries". Almost every party involved comes to recognise the particular cultural quirks (which varied from forum to forum) and how to translate what was said, to what was actually meant.

adw 1y ago

Python was everywhere in science by earlier than that (Numeric and numarray, Numpy’s predecessors, are from the late 90s/early 2000s).

spiderxxxx 1y ago

>From what I was told, Python was originally seen as a Swiss Army knife for sysadmins. Yea, I was a sysadmin around 2000 (before that too) and I knew it as such. >between 2005 and 2006, two important things happened: Somewhat - I used it in 2001 for Plone which is based on Zope, which was somewhat popular around that time. Writing all the web stuff with Python made sense, since Plone provided a CMS and could include a wiki. Adding on some sql calls to it in python just made sense. The competition was between PHP and Python, though there were some other less popular choices. Ruby on Rails definitely was getting a lot more popular around those times. PHP didn't start getting popular around 2005, if anything, people started using Python more, and started criticizing the crappy code that was circulating in the PHP community. In any case, it was a fun time, but what's the point of looking back like that?

snapetom 1y ago

This aligns with what I remember and Guido going to Google explains things. Mid 2000's was all about PHP (Cake/Symphony/CodeIgniter/etc) vs Ruby (Rails) in the open source world. I remember hearing about Python only in sysadmin work and Plone. Then, suddenly were suddenly a lot of articles from Google about just about everything, all in Python. I remember saying to a coworker, "Google is single-handedly keeping Python alive." Then bam. It was everywhere. Mid 2010's, I took a cybersec job and they told me to learn Python in the two weeks between accepting and starting. "Python is all over cybersec," I was told. It was then I realized Python took over academia, which positioned it perfectly for ML. It's features made it easy to start, but it also benefited from right place, right time.

pyman 1y ago
Guido's passion and leadership were the driving force behind Python. A lot of smart people aligned with his vision.

BiteCode_dev 1y ago

I'd say the switch was learning that Google Search was written in Python (remember when error pages URL were in .py ?), and Youtube rewritten in Python. After that, reddit and dropbox followed (and later Instagram). Apple also added Python in, I think, Mac OS X Jaguar, so it blipped on the radar. When you have big players using it, the community automatically grows. Django was the continuity of that and definitely contributed to the growing popularity of Python, but I think the hype started way before (and in fact we had to suffer Zope/Plone/Twisted for it :)). Another decisive date was circa 2010 when the Belgian book "learn programming with python" came out. Granted, Django was already 5 years old at the time, but it brought many beginners who knew nothing about programming at the time.