10 ms·

Python is doing just fine

84 points by timClicks 14y ago

fuzzix 14y ago
"I wonder if it is because its big brother Perl, which it used to tease, is no longer around to tease." Excuse me? Perl is doing just fine. The Python community doesn't really need a whipping boy, does it? It was quite offputting to me when Python texts, when promoting the features of the language, were essentially reduced to "It's more readable than Perl!" Is it as powerful and expressive as Perl or is anything sacrificed for this supposed readability? (I never saw it myself).
- lmm 14y ago
  Perl is certainly a lot less prominent than it used to be. It seems to have fallen out of favour as a web backend, it was never popular on the desktop, and I'm not seeing any interest in making it work on mobile. While I wouldn't say it was dying, it seems to be falling into the "scripting ghetto" that we worked so hard to escape.
  - draegtun 14y ago
    > and I'm not seeing any interest in making it work on mobile An accepted grant to make it easier to compile perl5 on Android is currently in progress: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/05/grant-application-improving-cr.html http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/05/grant-application-imp... | http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/09/improving-cross-compilation-of.html http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/09/improving-cross-compi.... Also there is Perldroid - http://code.google.com/p/perldroid/ http://code.google.com/p/perldroid/ And I assume SL4A is still available on Android? - http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ And for many years I had perl5 running on my Symbian phone :)
  - raiph 14y ago
    Perl 6 on Android: http://blogs.perl.org/users/martin_berends/2012/06/rakudo-perl-6-on-android-ics-403.html http://blogs.perl.org/users/martin_berends/2012/06/rakudo-pe... (Early adopters only!)
- jayflux 14y ago
  "perl is doing just fine" http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Perl.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Perl.html ^^ Really?
  - fuzzix 14y ago
    Sure. http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index-is-being-gamed/ http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index-is-being-gam...
- koide 14y ago
  I've heard many people saying that "Perl doesn't scale" - "90% of the successful startups run RoR, why wouldn't you?" - "If you use Perl and you get web scale you'll have many problems" I don't give at all credibility to such comments, but I have heard them. Perl's becoming every day more of a niche language. Maybe some marketing about great Perl built projects could help. Does something like this exist?
  - draegtun 14y ago
    > Maybe some marketing about great Perl built projects could help. Does something like this exist? Some do get "marketed" via Perl News (http://perlnews.org/ http://perlnews.org/) or PerlMonks (http://www.perlmonks.org/ http://www.perlmonks.org/). But I know of many Perl built projects which you only get to hear about via contacts, mailing lists or jobs postings. Here are some announcements of Perl built projects (that I recalled and found quickly)... * The Secrets Behind Blekko's Search Technology - http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/12/the-secrets-behind-blekkos-search-technology.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/12/the-secrets-behind-... * DuckDuckGo Architecture - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525048 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525048 * LOVEFiLM’s love affair with open source - http://www.itpro.co.uk/622960/lovefilm-s-love-affair-with-open-source http://www.itpro.co.uk/622960/lovefilm-s-love-affair-with-op... * Trendshare.org - http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/09/announcing-my-new-powered-by-perl-projects.html http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/09/announcing-my-new-... And here is a list of Perl start-ups that come to mind: Lokku, Moonfruit, CareerJet & Adzuna.
    - smacktoward 14y ago
      Some do get "marketed" via Perl News or PerlMonks Marketing is bringing your story to people who don't already know about it. Readers of Perl News and PerlMonks are very likely to already be Perl users/advocates.
  - dalke 14y ago
    Your response might be "what percentage of the failed startups run RoR?" ;)
Nate75Sanders 14y ago
Do a search (separately) for perl, python, ruby on indeed.com perl wins AND it's not a common word unlike the other two in fact, plenty of job postings misspell perl as "pearl" and I'm not even including them The fact that perl has more hits doesn't necessarily mean that there are actually more perl jobs than ruby or python jobs, but it certainly means that perl is still around, whether or not you want to tease it EDIT: I write python code every day and agree with pretty much everything else the author said.
- lazyjones 14y ago
  It could also mean that Perl programmers are in higher demand because there's not enough of them nowdays since all the cool kids are doing Ruby or JS ... (we know we are having a hard time finding Perl people, but then again we are not in Silicon Valley ...)
  - Nate75Sanders 14y ago
    I don't claim to know exactly why. I can tell you this, though -- a much crazier statistic is that about 1.5-1.75 years ago I did this same search on indeed.com and while it's difficult to believe now or then, perl not only was bigger than python or ruby, it was bigger than python and ruby combined. Among other reasons, I suspect there are a lot of older perl guys still around who don't blog/write articles because they do other things in their spare time and we don't hear as much about perl compared to node/python/ruby/etc.
    - nandemo 14y ago
      Perl was mainstream well before Python and Ruby became popular. Back in the 90s, anyone who was adopting Linux-based servers was likely using Perl in some way: web companies, small ISPs, even banks. So there are tons of legacy Perl out there.
      - lazyjones 14y ago
        Indeed, back in the mid 90's, pretty much all CGI script examples you could find anywhere were written in Perl.
ryangallen 14y ago
Also, it's worth mentioning that Udacity and CodeAcademy are teaching Python to thousands of new programmers.
dmbaggett 14y ago
FTA: It can sometimes feel scary when faced with a few risks to lose perspective of what has already been achieved. Just to be clear: my own comments about Python the last few days are driven from a purely pragmatic desire to ship a great product, on all screens, using Python. I cringe when I see comments like this that seem to conflate these pragmatic concerns with emotional language advocacy. Python is a beautiful, high-productivity, generally pragmatic language with millions of developers. That's why I chose to build my product around it. But all good things can be made better, and generally the best way to find the local optimum is to have lots of feedback from users -- especially developers who are pushing the envelope by doing ambitious things with the language. We are going to ship on iOS and WinRT using Python. Whether that's anything that the core Python devs particularly care about, and whether that helps Python in the gladiatorial combat between languages, is mostly irrelevant to me.
chuppo 14y ago
When JavaScript becomes a more stable general purpose language, Python will have to make a run for its cash. We have seen node.js and jslibs exists, as well as OpenGL bindings for v8. Microsoft has bade WinRT where JavaScript is a first-class citizen for desktop programs. What can python offer then? Numpy and scipy and twisted? Those are just libraries, and bindings can be made from JS to their respective hot-spots of C. JavaScript is already beating Python in speed.
- berntb 14y ago
  Is this why the "Perl is dead" trolling is disappearing? The Python people are busy with other things... :-)
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  I think, and I like to dream, that the next wave of stable general purpose languages will be functional. Given how distributed/concurrent/multi-x everything is, and will keep increasing in importance, it seems that functional languages will become more relevant. That said, as more and more domain specific languages come to be, and general purpose languages mature, there's probably not going to be a 'single winner.'
  - eric_bullington 14y ago
    Not sure if you'd consider it a general purpose language, but you can certainly use JavaScript in a functional style. It's not a "pure" functional language, but among commonly-cited languages, what is a pure functional language besides Haskell? If I'm not mistaken, proper tail calls are even slated for addition to the next version of the ECMAScript standard.
    - JackC 14y ago
      Out of my depth here, but I think functional languages are relevant to distributed/concurrent programming because they tend to provide (and enforce) explicit ways to avoid or manage side effects and mutability. They're likely to be very different at an interpreter/compiler level from a language that happens to allow you to avoid side effects and mutability, but isn't designed to know when you're doing that or to optimize for it. (I'm thinking, for example, of the insane way Clojure implements dictionaries under the hood in order to efficiently copy them rather than edit them in place, which in turn enables its approach to efficiently rolling back and retrying operations that contend for the same shared transactional memory.) The upshot is that an imperative language like JavaScript will let you borrow some nice techniques from the functional world, but won't have a lot of the benefits of a language that's designed to only be used that way. Again, no idea what I'm talking about, that's just the impression I have from the little I've learned about functional programming so far.
tehansen 14y ago
about python on mobile, and making it run on the NDK. Checkout kivy.org, it's a nextgen UI framework with pure opengl ES and multi-touch support from the ground up. It's pretty fast, especially since the core parts are written in C and it uses a sort of JIT graphics compiler. It runs on win/osx/linux as well as iOS and android. In fact through the android-for-python project (github.com/kivy), it does pretty much exactly what the author talks about in terms of making it run on the NDK. There is also the pyJNIus project to go along with it in order to call java code and sdk directly. python on mobile really is an option, and it lets you write cross platform apps in a very nice manner.
kamaal 14y ago
You know what? The very fact that you are having to write this post means Python isn't doing just fine. The fact is Python was a fashion some years ago. Like 2-3 years back, It was the hip language to learn. Now the current fashion is NodeJS and Go. Like it or not get used to this fact. Python system is currently undergoing wants of features what Go and NodeJS provide out of the box. This is feature hunger, and is fundamentally what causes languages to slowly phase out from the main stream to let other languages take its place. This doesn't mean Python is bad or lacks something. Its just that only its not the fashion currently. The fashion is something else, and people don't like old fashion being pushed down their throats. People like new stuff, Python is getting old, boring, too many people are into it now and its not hip anymore. Now, coming to the other part. Contrary to whatever you think Perl is doing awesome at this time now. Because the Perl community has moved on. Those dark troll days that existed 5 years back are gone. There are some very awesome things happening in the Perl community which probably are not happening even in Python. Perl has learned its lesson the hard way. Which is if you want to survive and compete, ship awesome stuff! And Perl is doing just that. New syntax, sugar and enhancements are going in to Perl core every major release(2 years). CPAN is going just awesome. Apart from that people like chromatic are doing real great work in the documentation area. There are tools like Moose, Devel::Declare, DBIx::Class etc which probably Python can never get ever! In the other news Perl 6 is hurling quickly towards its finish line and will be there in short time now(like probably next year end), and for a project of such huge magnitude it will be quite a language to watch out.
- pyre 14y ago
  I thought that "Perl 6 is not Perl" was pretty much well understood by now. Perl 5 and Perl 6 are such vastly different languages, that they might as we have just named it something different.
  - kamaal 14y ago
    I think its right to say Perl 6 is not Perl 5. But Perl 6 is definitely Perl. I mean its Perl because it preserves the spirit of Perl since Perl 1. Besides as Larry has mentioned in so many occasions, Though Perl 6 has been designed ground up, in many ways that's the language Perl he always wanted to use. Using the name Perl also serves marketing needs.
dbecker 14y ago
The library support for data science with python has improved a lot in the last few months... There are lots of shiny new options for web development, but I think python is gaining momentum rather than losing it for data analysis and scientific programming. I expect that user base will increase even faster after Wes McKinney's "Python for Data Analysis" book is published.
- thronemonkey 14y ago
  Agree. I just started doing scientific computing in python/scipy/numpy/matplotlib and it is fantastic. I see python going nowhere but up in the scientific community.
- nacker 14y ago
  Python is now totally dominant in scientific domains. The typical user is interested in ease of use and mature libraries, not in speed or niceties that are debated on Lambda the Ultimate.
noelwelsh 14y ago
People use languages for many reasons, but the most common reason is that it is perceived to solve a problem better than the alternatives. The R language is a frigging mess but it has a huge number of libraries in the statistical domain. For this reason it's a popular choice for writing data exploration and analysis programs. The JVM the only game in town if you want some combination of high performance, the ability to do user-space systems level programming, type safety, and GC. Nobody loves Java but it is the easiest language to recruit for if you're targeting the JVM. Rails is the engine that drives Ruby. iOS drives Objective-C. The browser drives Javascript. To me (an very infrequent user of Python) Python has NumPy and Django. So long as those projects continue to maintain their share of thought leadership Python will be fine. --- Kinda odd to see this post on HN. It doesn't really seem to say much.
- DocSavage 14y ago
  "The JVM the only game in town if you want some combination of high performance, the ability to do user-space systems level programming, type safety, and GC." I think all those points are covered by Go. And Go is more succinct. It was trivial to cross-compile Go executables on my Mac for Windows and Linux.
  - ch0wn 14y ago
    The next sentence ruins it though: "Nobody loves Java but it is the easiest language to recruit for if you're targeting the JVM." Recruiting for Go is not nearly as easy as for Java.
    - eru 14y ago
      Promising work in Scala or Clojure will probably lead to better success. At least if you employ a measure of success even slightly more sophisticated than thickness of the pile of resumes you receive.
    - luriel 14y ago
      If you hire a Go programmer, it probably will be somebody that deeply cares about their work, somebody who has a certain sense for aesthetic and technical simplicity, and other qualities that not common that among Java programmers.
adrianmn 14y ago
Also started this week with 50k online students: Learn to Program: The Fundamentals (pyton from 0) - https://www.coursera.org/course/programming1 https://www.coursera.org/course/programming1
Aloisius 14y ago
Wait, Python was sexy at one point? The engineers I know who use python are all serious, pragmatic and a little OCD. They didn't learn Python because it was sexy, they learned it because it because it was an ultra-readable language. I don't think Python was ever sexy. There was a bit of a Ruby vs. Python thing a few years ago, but both languages were downright old when they became popular. A year ago, we had people telling us that JavaScript of all things is sexy because of NodeJS. Now it is Go (though that hype seems to be fading quickly). People really need to stop worrying about the flavor of the week. You're never going to be programming in the sexy language for more than a couple years before the next trend pops up.
- rudiger 14y ago
  It's the people who worry about the flavor of the week (the early followers, if you will) who take the language from "sexy, trendy, and unstable" to "productive, stable, serious, and pragmatic."
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    In my experience those people might get things started but they leave for the next "sexy, trendy and unstable" language and then actual engineering gets done to get "productive, stable, serious, and pragmatic." actually working.
- espeed 14y ago
  Clojure and Go are sexy right now, but I see no signs of that fading.
- nacker 14y ago
  The best argument for the quality of anything, is that it succeeds despite lacking "sexiness". I first encountered python in 1993, and although I was intrigued, my first reaction was that it could never become popular, because it was too good! Almost 20 years later, I'm glad to see that people are not as stupid as I sometimes think.

84 points by timClicks 14y ago

"I wonder if it is because its big brother Perl, which it used to tease, is no longer around to tease." Excuse me? Perl is doing just fine. The Python community doesn't really need a whipping boy, does it? It was quite offputting to me when Python texts, when promoting the features of the language, were essentially reduced to "It's more readable than Perl!" Is it as powerful and expressive as Perl or is anything sacrificed for this supposed readability? (I never saw it myself).

lmm 14y ago
Perl is certainly a lot less prominent than it used to be. It seems to have fallen out of favour as a web backend, it was never popular on the desktop, and I'm not seeing any interest in making it work on mobile. While I wouldn't say it was dying, it seems to be falling into the "scripting ghetto" that we worked so hard to escape.
- draegtun 14y ago
  > and I'm not seeing any interest in making it work on mobile An accepted grant to make it easier to compile perl5 on Android is currently in progress: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/05/grant-application-improving-cr.html http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/05/grant-application-imp... | http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/09/improving-cross-compilation-of.html http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/09/improving-cross-compi.... Also there is Perldroid - http://code.google.com/p/perldroid/ http://code.google.com/p/perldroid/ And I assume SL4A is still available on Android? - http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ And for many years I had perl5 running on my Symbian phone :)
- raiph 14y ago
  Perl 6 on Android: http://blogs.perl.org/users/martin_berends/2012/06/rakudo-perl-6-on-android-ics-403.html http://blogs.perl.org/users/martin_berends/2012/06/rakudo-pe... (Early adopters only!)
jayflux 14y ago
"perl is doing just fine" http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Perl.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Perl.html ^^ Really?
- fuzzix 14y ago
  Sure. http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index-is-being-gamed/ http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index-is-being-gam...
koide 14y ago
I've heard many people saying that "Perl doesn't scale" - "90% of the successful startups run RoR, why wouldn't you?" - "If you use Perl and you get web scale you'll have many problems" I don't give at all credibility to such comments, but I have heard them. Perl's becoming every day more of a niche language. Maybe some marketing about great Perl built projects could help. Does something like this exist?
- draegtun 14y ago
  > Maybe some marketing about great Perl built projects could help. Does something like this exist? Some do get "marketed" via Perl News (http://perlnews.org/ http://perlnews.org/) or PerlMonks (http://www.perlmonks.org/ http://www.perlmonks.org/). But I know of many Perl built projects which you only get to hear about via contacts, mailing lists or jobs postings. Here are some announcements of Perl built projects (that I recalled and found quickly)... * The Secrets Behind Blekko's Search Technology - http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/12/the-secrets-behind-blekkos-search-technology.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/12/the-secrets-behind-... * DuckDuckGo Architecture - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525048 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525048 * LOVEFiLM’s love affair with open source - http://www.itpro.co.uk/622960/lovefilm-s-love-affair-with-open-source http://www.itpro.co.uk/622960/lovefilm-s-love-affair-with-op... * Trendshare.org - http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/09/announcing-my-new-powered-by-perl-projects.html http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/09/announcing-my-new-... And here is a list of Perl start-ups that come to mind: Lokku, Moonfruit, CareerJet & Adzuna.
  - smacktoward 14y ago
    Some do get "marketed" via Perl News or PerlMonks Marketing is bringing your story to people who don't already know about it. Readers of Perl News and PerlMonks are very likely to already be Perl users/advocates.
- dalke 14y ago
  Your response might be "what percentage of the failed startups run RoR?" ;)

Nate75Sanders 14y ago

Do a search (separately) for perl, python, ruby on indeed.com perl wins AND it's not a common word unlike the other two in fact, plenty of job postings misspell perl as "pearl" and I'm not even including them The fact that perl has more hits doesn't necessarily mean that there are actually more perl jobs than ruby or python jobs, but it certainly means that perl is still around, whether or not you want to tease it EDIT: I write python code every day and agree with pretty much everything else the author said.

lazyjones 14y ago
It could also mean that Perl programmers are in higher demand because there's not enough of them nowdays since all the cool kids are doing Ruby or JS ... (we know we are having a hard time finding Perl people, but then again we are not in Silicon Valley ...)
- Nate75Sanders 14y ago
  I don't claim to know exactly why. I can tell you this, though -- a much crazier statistic is that about 1.5-1.75 years ago I did this same search on indeed.com and while it's difficult to believe now or then, perl not only was bigger than python or ruby, it was bigger than python and ruby combined. Among other reasons, I suspect there are a lot of older perl guys still around who don't blog/write articles because they do other things in their spare time and we don't hear as much about perl compared to node/python/ruby/etc.
  - nandemo 14y ago
    Perl was mainstream well before Python and Ruby became popular. Back in the 90s, anyone who was adopting Linux-based servers was likely using Perl in some way: web companies, small ISPs, even banks. So there are tons of legacy Perl out there.
    - lazyjones 14y ago
      Indeed, back in the mid 90's, pretty much all CGI script examples you could find anywhere were written in Perl.

ryangallen 14y ago

Also, it's worth mentioning that Udacity and CodeAcademy are teaching Python to thousands of new programmers.

dmbaggett 14y ago

FTA: It can sometimes feel scary when faced with a few risks to lose perspective of what has already been achieved. Just to be clear: my own comments about Python the last few days are driven from a purely pragmatic desire to ship a great product, on all screens, using Python. I cringe when I see comments like this that seem to conflate these pragmatic concerns with emotional language advocacy. Python is a beautiful, high-productivity, generally pragmatic language with millions of developers. That's why I chose to build my product around it. But all good things can be made better, and generally the best way to find the local optimum is to have lots of feedback from users -- especially developers who are pushing the envelope by doing ambitious things with the language. We are going to ship on iOS and WinRT using Python. Whether that's anything that the core Python devs particularly care about, and whether that helps Python in the gladiatorial combat between languages, is mostly irrelevant to me.

chuppo 14y ago

When JavaScript becomes a more stable general purpose language, Python will have to make a run for its cash. We have seen node.js and jslibs exists, as well as OpenGL bindings for v8. Microsoft has bade WinRT where JavaScript is a first-class citizen for desktop programs. What can python offer then? Numpy and scipy and twisted? Those are just libraries, and bindings can be made from JS to their respective hot-spots of C. JavaScript is already beating Python in speed.

berntb 14y ago
Is this why the "Perl is dead" trolling is disappearing? The Python people are busy with other things... :-)
manaskarekar 14y ago
I think, and I like to dream, that the next wave of stable general purpose languages will be functional. Given how distributed/concurrent/multi-x everything is, and will keep increasing in importance, it seems that functional languages will become more relevant. That said, as more and more domain specific languages come to be, and general purpose languages mature, there's probably not going to be a 'single winner.'
- eric_bullington 14y ago
  Not sure if you'd consider it a general purpose language, but you can certainly use JavaScript in a functional style. It's not a "pure" functional language, but among commonly-cited languages, what is a pure functional language besides Haskell? If I'm not mistaken, proper tail calls are even slated for addition to the next version of the ECMAScript standard.
  - JackC 14y ago
    Out of my depth here, but I think functional languages are relevant to distributed/concurrent programming because they tend to provide (and enforce) explicit ways to avoid or manage side effects and mutability. They're likely to be very different at an interpreter/compiler level from a language that happens to allow you to avoid side effects and mutability, but isn't designed to know when you're doing that or to optimize for it. (I'm thinking, for example, of the insane way Clojure implements dictionaries under the hood in order to efficiently copy them rather than edit them in place, which in turn enables its approach to efficiently rolling back and retrying operations that contend for the same shared transactional memory.) The upshot is that an imperative language like JavaScript will let you borrow some nice techniques from the functional world, but won't have a lot of the benefits of a language that's designed to only be used that way. Again, no idea what I'm talking about, that's just the impression I have from the little I've learned about functional programming so far.

tehansen 14y ago

about python on mobile, and making it run on the NDK. Checkout kivy.org, it's a nextgen UI framework with pure opengl ES and multi-touch support from the ground up. It's pretty fast, especially since the core parts are written in C and it uses a sort of JIT graphics compiler. It runs on win/osx/linux as well as iOS and android. In fact through the android-for-python project (github.com/kivy), it does pretty much exactly what the author talks about in terms of making it run on the NDK. There is also the pyJNIus project to go along with it in order to call java code and sdk directly. python on mobile really is an option, and it lets you write cross platform apps in a very nice manner.

kamaal 14y ago

You know what? The very fact that you are having to write this post means Python isn't doing just fine. The fact is Python was a fashion some years ago. Like 2-3 years back, It was the hip language to learn. Now the current fashion is NodeJS and Go. Like it or not get used to this fact. Python system is currently undergoing wants of features what Go and NodeJS provide out of the box. This is feature hunger, and is fundamentally what causes languages to slowly phase out from the main stream to let other languages take its place. This doesn't mean Python is bad or lacks something. Its just that only its not the fashion currently. The fashion is something else, and people don't like old fashion being pushed down their throats. People like new stuff, Python is getting old, boring, too many people are into it now and its not hip anymore. Now, coming to the other part. Contrary to whatever you think Perl is doing awesome at this time now. Because the Perl community has moved on. Those dark troll days that existed 5 years back are gone. There are some very awesome things happening in the Perl community which probably are not happening even in Python. Perl has learned its lesson the hard way. Which is if you want to survive and compete, ship awesome stuff! And Perl is doing just that. New syntax, sugar and enhancements are going in to Perl core every major release(2 years). CPAN is going just awesome. Apart from that people like chromatic are doing real great work in the documentation area. There are tools like Moose, Devel::Declare, DBIx::Class etc which probably Python can never get ever! In the other news Perl 6 is hurling quickly towards its finish line and will be there in short time now(like probably next year end), and for a project of such huge magnitude it will be quite a language to watch out.

pyre 14y ago
I thought that "Perl 6 is not Perl" was pretty much well understood by now. Perl 5 and Perl 6 are such vastly different languages, that they might as we have just named it something different.
- kamaal 14y ago
  I think its right to say Perl 6 is not Perl 5. But Perl 6 is definitely Perl. I mean its Perl because it preserves the spirit of Perl since Perl 1. Besides as Larry has mentioned in so many occasions, Though Perl 6 has been designed ground up, in many ways that's the language Perl he always wanted to use. Using the name Perl also serves marketing needs.

dbecker 14y ago

The library support for data science with python has improved a lot in the last few months... There are lots of shiny new options for web development, but I think python is gaining momentum rather than losing it for data analysis and scientific programming. I expect that user base will increase even faster after Wes McKinney's "Python for Data Analysis" book is published.

thronemonkey 14y ago
Agree. I just started doing scientific computing in python/scipy/numpy/matplotlib and it is fantastic. I see python going nowhere but up in the scientific community.
nacker 14y ago
Python is now totally dominant in scientific domains. The typical user is interested in ease of use and mature libraries, not in speed or niceties that are debated on Lambda the Ultimate.

noelwelsh 14y ago

People use languages for many reasons, but the most common reason is that it is perceived to solve a problem better than the alternatives. The R language is a frigging mess but it has a huge number of libraries in the statistical domain. For this reason it's a popular choice for writing data exploration and analysis programs. The JVM the only game in town if you want some combination of high performance, the ability to do user-space systems level programming, type safety, and GC. Nobody loves Java but it is the easiest language to recruit for if you're targeting the JVM. Rails is the engine that drives Ruby. iOS drives Objective-C. The browser drives Javascript. To me (an very infrequent user of Python) Python has NumPy and Django. So long as those projects continue to maintain their share of thought leadership Python will be fine. --- Kinda odd to see this post on HN. It doesn't really seem to say much.

DocSavage 14y ago
"The JVM the only game in town if you want some combination of high performance, the ability to do user-space systems level programming, type safety, and GC." I think all those points are covered by Go. And Go is more succinct. It was trivial to cross-compile Go executables on my Mac for Windows and Linux.
- ch0wn 14y ago
  The next sentence ruins it though: "Nobody loves Java but it is the easiest language to recruit for if you're targeting the JVM." Recruiting for Go is not nearly as easy as for Java.
  - eru 14y ago
    Promising work in Scala or Clojure will probably lead to better success. At least if you employ a measure of success even slightly more sophisticated than thickness of the pile of resumes you receive.
  - luriel 14y ago
    If you hire a Go programmer, it probably will be somebody that deeply cares about their work, somebody who has a certain sense for aesthetic and technical simplicity, and other qualities that not common that among Java programmers.

adrianmn 14y ago

Also started this week with 50k online students: Learn to Program: The Fundamentals (pyton from 0) - https://www.coursera.org/course/programming1 https://www.coursera.org/course/programming1

Aloisius 14y ago

Wait, Python was sexy at one point? The engineers I know who use python are all serious, pragmatic and a little OCD. They didn't learn Python because it was sexy, they learned it because it because it was an ultra-readable language. I don't think Python was ever sexy. There was a bit of a Ruby vs. Python thing a few years ago, but both languages were downright old when they became popular. A year ago, we had people telling us that JavaScript of all things is sexy because of NodeJS. Now it is Go (though that hype seems to be fading quickly). People really need to stop worrying about the flavor of the week. You're never going to be programming in the sexy language for more than a couple years before the next trend pops up.

rudiger 14y ago
It's the people who worry about the flavor of the week (the early followers, if you will) who take the language from "sexy, trendy, and unstable" to "productive, stable, serious, and pragmatic."
- freshhawk 14y ago
  In my experience those people might get things started but they leave for the next "sexy, trendy and unstable" language and then actual engineering gets done to get "productive, stable, serious, and pragmatic." actually working.
espeed 14y ago
Clojure and Go are sexy right now, but I see no signs of that fading.
nacker 14y ago
The best argument for the quality of anything, is that it succeeds despite lacking "sexiness". I first encountered python in 1993, and although I was intrigued, my first reaction was that it could never become popular, because it was too good! Almost 20 years later, I'm glad to see that people are not as stupid as I sometimes think.