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...don't get mad for the question, but: anybody has any arguments for using Python instead of, let's say Ruby, these days? (besides the "I already know it incre
by autarch 14y ago
...don't get mad for the question, but: anybody has any arguments for using Python instead of, let's say Ruby, these days? (besides the "I already know it incredibly well" argument)
...cause the lack of an answer to such a question has only one conclusion: the language is dying, even if this is not already happening in a visible way!
(don't get me wrong, I'm not a Python hater, and fyi, I think the world would be a much better place if David Heinemeier Hansson would have learned Python and written a nice Python web framework instead of inventing Rails :) )
- bryanl 14y agoRuby doesn't have great support for math, science or AI. There are projects out there trying to make the ecosystem better, but currently it trails Python.
- dasmoth 14y agoFor biology -- especially the genomics side -- Perl was absolutely dominant 10 years ago. It's been gradually edged out by other things (substantially Python and R) since then. Desire for better statistical tools may be a driver here, but it's interesting that it's led to a switch of languages rather than building more stats tools for Perl
- gajomi 14y agoI would say that Perl is still dominant in computational genomics. About a year ago I wrote some code to do some basic comparative analysis at the genome level alongside some more gene focused phylogeny efforts. Since the whole thing was quite simple it wasn't a problem to write the overall structure, but getting the bioinformatics Python libraries working was a pain. Even if the code tiself was Python the API was littered with various Perl and Bash idioms and there was a major bug in at least one of the tree building methods (had to patch it myself). Calls to subprocesses within the libraries (a heavy part of most bioinformatics work, where there are thousands of stand alone command line programs) would often fail without warning. The state of the art in this area is definitely behind Ruby and far behind Perl. However, Python is still my main language and I am very happy with that. The numpy/scipy stack and everything building around that is incomparable to anything in Perl of Ruby. Also for the last month or so I have been doing work in the IPython notebook. It has really helped my productivity and documentation efforts. And it looks really cool.
- nnq 14y agoI get the joke, but there are thousands of people currently learning either Ruby or Python and tons of classes for them, it's incredibly easy to hire either a Python or a Ruby (or PHP or Javascript) programmer and so on... while Perl is slowly falling off the radar.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- no_more_death 14y agoThere are 100000 perl modules, all backed up by an extensive test suite. About jobs: knowing a popular language guarantees you a job, but it doesn't guarantee you a good job. Those shooting for a higher level can pick what language they want. Those looking for higher level programmers will find a much broader distribution of language preferences. Hence Twitter runs on Scala, Blekko runs on perl.
- doktrin 14y ago> Hence Twitter runs on Scala, Blekko runs on perl. Those are hardly equivalent (aside from the obvious differences in prominence, scale and relative importance between Blekko and Twitter). Scala shops attracts developers curious about new paradigms (FP / FP hybrid) whereas Perl shops tends to repel forward-looking developers who view it (accurately or not) as an ugly throwback to the year 2000. Put plainly : Scala sells itself (to a certain crowd) whereas Perl needs to be be sold almost across the board. Scala is viewed as an up-and-comer, Perl as a has-been.
- berntb 14y ago>>... is viewed as ... The GP argued why a tech choice is good, you answer by arguing the reality -- of the fud! That was quite funny. Edit: OK, I was talking about the first part, CPAN. You only made claims about jobs (that there are no good Perl jobs being created, which duckduckgo by itself should have killed.)
- 14y ago
- PommeDeTerre 14y agoThe superb community is one of Python's biggest assets, especially when compared to the Ruby community. The Python community is made up of some very smart and talented experts. Their emphasis is on developing high-quality software, and doing things properly. Egos are kept in check, and there are always many people willing to offer a helping hand to those who are new to Python. The Ruby community is generally quite different. There is a much bigger emphasis on celebrity and ego, and being "trendy". The attitude toward software development is different, too, with much more emphasis on producing a lot of code quickly, even if it has security flaws or other serious problems. It's more about being seen and heard, rather than doing. I'd put the Perl community somewhere in between the Python and Ruby communities. Back when it was more prominent, it had a more lively set of participants than we than we find in the Python community, but a much higher degree of technical aptitude than we find in the Ruby community.
- pyre 14y ago| Their emphasis is on [...] doing things properly Too bad that doesn't extend to a better solution to packaging / deployment. :P
- razzmataz 14y agoNobody really seems to get that right.
- zby 14y agoPerl improved much in this area. The main reason for that is probably the automatic tests that for every new release on CPAN are run on a wide array of systems. This kind of infrastructure plus emphasis on having tests in the libraries is where Perl is still ahead of other languages.
- pyre 14y agoThat and the fact that you browse the documentation on CPAN. PyPI (for example) is only an index of packages, the documentation needs to be hosted elsewhere.
- rdtsc 14y ago> anybody has any arguments for using Python instead of, let's say Ruby, these days Yap. * Better libraries * PyPy * gevent for green thread based concurrency * Cython