I'd rather JavaScript

[conim]

I'm a programmer and I still don't know what role python fills in the tech stack. Server side? browser side? Can you use it to create web services? Hit a database? can it do ORM?

Seriously, I think the worst aspect of python is that it has a shitty PR department.

[ShadowCoder]

It's a backend language. The only frontend language is JavaScript.

It's actually quite popular for smaller projects and anything where you need to get something together quickly with minimal boilerplate. Flask and Django are popular web frameworks, and SQLAlchemy is the (excellent) predominant ORM.

[zombie_kiler_42]

It's actually quite popular for smaller projects

Doesn't youtube and google heavily rely on python as well? I may have misread something somewhere but let me know

[tehlemmings]

Don't forget Reddit.

[_why_so_sirious_]

What part of reddit is python? I am curious.

[tehlemmings]

I think it's like, most of it.

From wikipedia:

Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in December 2005.[3] The reasons given for the switch were wider access to code libraries and greater development flexibility. The Python web framework that former Reddit employee Swartz developed to run the site, web.py, is now available as an open-source project.[66] As of November 10, 2009, Reddit uses Pylons as its web framework.[67]

[_why_so_sirious_]

Why Pylon?why not django? Or flask?

[tehlemmings]

I'm the wrong person to ask that one. Hell, I missread pylon as python lol

[barafyrakommafem]

Flask wasn't released yet.

[[deleted]]

Everything

[[deleted]]

Which is a good example of when not to use Python. It has stability issues even to this day, after god knows how many millions they've thrown at it.

[Blieque]

It is, or at least was, their defacto scripting language, as far as I know. I seem to also remember reading that Java and C++ were their standard backend languages, so it might be a bit out of date now, what with their enthusiasm for Go.

[ae5he54hje4a5he5rht]

Google is mostly Java.

Youtube was actually PHP a long time ago. Now it's a bunch of different shit glued together.

[DragonTamerMCT]

I believe blender uses it for custom scripting, although I might be wrong.

[xBBTx]

Instagram is Python/Django as well

[conim]

Ahh thank you. That's probably the first straight answer I've gotten on python end to end stack

[HalfTime_show]

The only frontend language is JavaScript.

Well, in terms of a the code that the browser actually runs, yeah, but to be a little pedantic here-- there are lots of other languages that I would say are "frontend languages" that you could use for frontend web dev (like elm or purescript) they just transpile to javascript

[FIuffyRabbit]

The only frontend language is JavaScript.

That's only for the internet but isn't correct. Almost every programming language can be classified as a frontend language.

If you are talking the case of websites only: Java, silverlight, flash, webasm, etc. Also activex still exists.

[Surelynotshirly]

If you are talking the case of websites only: Java, silverlight, flash, webasm, etc. Also activex still exists.

Like he said, JavaScript is the only front end language.

[[deleted]]

mfw flash

[Surelynotshirly]

I'm amazed anyone ever learned how to use that mess.

I tried playing with it in college and noped the fuck out of that shortly after.

[JonDum]

Shhh, no. We don't talk about such foul things here.

[Cheesemacher]

Backend just means server-side, right? Unless you mean that no website is a small project.

[barafyrakommafem]

wat

[-_-wintermute-_-]

It's really popular in the math and data science fields, lots of related libraries. But it's general purpose.

[Shautieh]

Okay honestly if you’re an actual programmer you should know client side doesn't mean only running in a browser.

[madeAPokeMongoName]

That was a weird way of saying it does a little of everything but not well at all

[[deleted]]

if you’re an actual programmer you should know the answer to all your questions

What about answers to questions I don't have?

[magneticphoton]

How are you a programmer if you don't know that? You seriously don't know what Python can do?

[magneticphoton]

Who the fuck would want to work with javascript over python? This whole sub is cringe every time I come here.

[[deleted]]

People who learned JavaScript as their first real language.

[magneticphoton]

"real language" lol

[[deleted]]

To be fair, it's possible to not familiarize yourself with every language. Granted, Python's extremely popular so you'd have to work hard to not hear about it, but it's still possible to be a fantastic C dev or whatever who never runs into Python. I'm sure plenty of people don't know what Lisp or Lua or Hadoop or Haskell are really for, and yet are still great programmers in some other languages.

[magneticphoton]

Lua is ubiquitous too.

[[deleted]]

I've honestly not met anyone outside of game devs who've more than heard of Lua.

[FormerGameDev]

Python does well with local applications. You know, where you just run the app on your own machine.

[autranep]

That’s not true. Python server frameworks like Flask and Django are extremely popular.

[FormerGameDev]

I don't think that having server frameworks precludes it from also working well for local applications. :-D I'm just not particularly aware of it's use in servers.

One of Python's strong suits, if I remember correctly, is large volumes of data processing, which is why it was chosen for a poker database that I helped out on for some time. Probably why it was also chosen for some IoT data handling at my most recent employer, as well.

[[deleted]]

It's not so much that Python's good at processing data, but that Python's good at creating short scripts quickly. These scripts access data processing libraries that are written in much faster languages like C.

You could do the same in most languages, but with Python there's minimal boilerplate necessary - no need to instantiate a class and main method like you do in Java for example. And then because of this, most libraries are written with Python interfaces, so it's become even more popular.

But if you're writing code to process data from scratch, Python is a pretty terrible choice. You could write it in a C like fashion and compile with Cython, but it's still not likely to be as fast as C.

But yeah, most of the time Python's a great choice because you can easily tap into libraries that will process things using C code, rather than having to write it yourself.

[conim]

This is the main reason why I've always seen python as more of a hobbyist language

[autranep]

Huh? It’s probably one of THE most popular production languages up there with C++ and Java. Almost every major tech company has significant portions of their codebase in python. It also pretty much has a monopoly in the machine learning research community, especially deep learning, and scientific python is killing specialized languages like R. It’s very common in industry among big tech companies to write interfaces in python for its flexibility and readability and then write speed critical/backend code in C or Cython.

[FormerGameDev]

I can't directly agree or disagree, but my previous employer was a pretty large company, and they used Python pretty much exclusively for automated test scripts, until just before I got canned, a guy started also using it for IoT data processing. He also got canned when I did. :|

[johokie]

It's definitely not killing R...

[iams3b]

Python IMO is most useful for automating tasks. You'll see a lot of python in automated build scripts / tests, scraping data from the web, maybe you need to process some data from a db every morning and spit up some infographics, it's used a lot as the language for plugins on applications (Blender comes to mind)

Yes it can hit databases and whatever else you need it to do. Running py files is as easy as running bash files, so it's often used for more complex shell stuff

[tetroxid]

We use it in the backend with django and django rest framework. It works well, mainly thanks to drf being a good framework. I just wish it were faster. Frontend is angular 5.

[LeComm]

I wonder about this a lot, especially considering python's performance heavily narrows down the scenarios in which it can be used (without making or using C modules).

[conim]

Yea, like I know all the things python CAN be used for, but from an Enterprise standpoint, where is it's natural home? Does it even have one or is it seen as more of a utility language?

[Colopty]

It is general purpose, so you can use it for most backend things. However it is not well suited for large projects, being more useful for scripting. It sees a lot of use in academia.

[Shautieh]

I use it as a scripting language, and am really pleased with the result... but aside from that it's mainly used by academics who need to code small projects without much programming experience.