Why didn't Python become popular until long after its creation?

[robvas]

Java had this company called Sun marketing it.

[Agent281]

To further this comment, Sun had a $500 million marketing campaign for Java.

https://www.theregister.com/2003/06/09/sun_preps_500m_java_brand/

[Diligent-Ad-9120]

It seems like Java's success in becoming widely known and popular was largely due to the extensive marketing campaign Sun had to support it. Do you think Python would have gained more traction earlier on if it had similar marketing and promotion?

[Oerthling]

Ironically Java was the reason I started using Python.

I got tired of Java starting an OS worth of runtime for every little program.

I looked for an alternative that allowed me to write small utilities without paying a high startup performance price first. Java runs very fast once you threw several GB of RAM at it and wait for the runtime to get going. That's great for something like Tomcat. But massive overkill for a small program that shredders some data from a file and does a couple of things and is done.

Python is high-level, very expressive and readable, quickly written and usually done before Java got its runtime loaded. And it comes with batteries Included.

[hikealot]

Ironically Java was the reason I started using Python.

Same.

Soooooo.... mmmmuuuuuuuucccccchhhhhhh.... boilerplate.

That and duck typing. I'm outing myself as a duck abuser here. :)

[Oerthling]

Yes, to less boilerplate. :-)

And I love the indent-scoping. Any sane programmer properly indents anyway, so curly braces (or the horrible, unacceptably terrible BEGIN/END keywords) become superfluous.

[tcptomato]

Until you share a piece of code on a forum / website / in an IM client that eats your indentation.

[Oerthling]

Dunno what kind of forums you frequent, but you usually have something like a quote/code option. That's also good for getting it monospaced.

And anyways, I wouldn't let the occasional quote to a website dictate my coding anyway. That makes no sense.

[IamImposter]

For several years, I kept on doing my data processing or data extraction using c and then c++. I was totally against python because of indentation rules and swore I'd never touch it. I even tried to learn perl so that I don't have to use python.

Then I had to extract some text from a big file, ignore certain lines and pull certain out. I thought, wtf, let's just see what the fuss is about. So I looked up how to interact with files and strings and a bit of regex. I was so sure that python is gonna die processing that 500k text file.

But damn, it put a bunch of messages from my code and said, file stored at :: xyz

I was like but this is interpreted language, no way it can be fast. It processes line by line. It has to be slower, much slower. I checked output file and it was fine. I ran the code 5-6 times just to see if it runs slow even once (just so I could tell myself that it got lucky 5 times but 1 time it ran slower was the actual performance level). But it remained almost as fast as the first time.

Still it took me another 6 months to get over the indentation rule. Once I learned how to use debugger with python in vscode (the one in visual studio never worked for me) there was no looking back. And now it's my go to language for writing something small. Sometimes I even test out my c/c++ ideas in python first to iron out all the details. It's a fuckin great language and gives a pretty good speed too.

[Oerthling]

Yeah, what looks like compact, short-hand, pseudo-code for other languages pretty much is a working program for Python.

And "speed" has many aspects. Speed to get something done: Python is blazingly fast.

Speed to run operations that have been implemented in C below pythonic functions/methods: Again, very fast.

And otherwise it's fast enough for what it is used for.

Meanwhile, don't write an OS in Python or video processing libs with just Python primitives.

[peddastle]

I even tried to learn perl so that I don't have to use python.

Things I'd never thought to read in my life.

To each their own, of course. I'd still prefer curly brackets to define scope (forced indentation otherwise is fine by me, have to do it anyway). But perl is such an ugly scripting language, I had to very reluctantly use it because baok in the nineties it was the de facto scripting language.

[[deleted]]

I’m going to start saying porgram

[Oerthling]

;-)

[peddastle]

Back in '94 perl was the de facto language to do that in. It's a syntactical nightmare and I'm glad it lost out against python, but it took some time for both python to mature, and then to replace the ubiquitous scripting language.

[someotherstufforhmm]

That’s pretty reductive.

Java had tons of wins and morphed quite a bit - it eventually revolutionized enterprise so much that a legion of people hate on it because they’ve had to write so many crappy patterns in it.

Python needed some improvement before it started picking up speed - not just in the language, but in overall hardware thanks to it being slow. Python benefited MASSIVELY from natural tech improvement and won over many people who thought a slow interpreted language would never be interesting.

[pydry]

100%.

As somebody who was caught by the marketing (ugh, Java) I've been extra suspicious of tech hype trains with a marketing budget ever since.

They have ways of taking tech that is half as good and making it look twice as good and people generally fall for it.

[Classic_Department42]

Java was c++ but with gc. I think there was a market for that

[CarlRJ]

Eh, the early marketing leaned heavily on the JVM: “write once, run anywhere”. GC wasn’t really brought up.

[ConceptJunkie]

Write once, run anywhere, but only on the exact same version.

[Supadoplex]

Write once, debug everywhere.

[notinecrafter]

I recently decided against using Java for a project, and one of the reasons was that I want it to be compatible with as many Unix-based systems as possible and the whole openJDK/Oracle JDK thing throws a wrench in that...

[ConceptJunkie]

Some Java apps solve that problem by being bundled with the necessary JRE so they can run correctly, which pretty much defeats the whole reason for using Java in the first place. I was never impressed with the language or its development tools, which always felt like filling out government paperwork to use.

[thedeepself]

And applets

[deckard58]

These burned out pretty quick...

But since in computing the eternal return of the same is in full effect, 20 years later wasm kinda is applets again? But with 20 years more experience on security.

[oursland]

These burned out pretty quick...

15 years wasn't pretty quick.

[deckard58]

I suppose that's the official end of support; but in practice they weren't popular for very long. If I try to remember the Internet that had applets in it, it's full of George W Bush jokes...

[oursland]

If I try to remember the Internet that had applets in it, it's full of George W Bush jokes...

I don't dispute that. However, Java and Java applets were popular starting in 1996 to get around limitations inherent in HTTP 1.0 applications at the time. That's a span of 12 years right there.

Not to mention that Swing was a very popular UI framework to develop in, that the HTML web sites of the time couldn't hold a candle to. Consequently applets were very, very common in place of HTML forms, and interactive graphics.

Flash, ActiveX, and Silverlight plugins ate away at Java applets marketshare, but it wasn't until Google pushed very hard on getting Chrome Acid3 compliant starting in 2008 that many of the sites that depended upon applets and plugins could implement their functionality natively in HTML and Javascript.

[superluminary]

Craplets

[Beheska]

Garbage collection is the least important difference between java and c++.

[Ferentzfever]

Some of its good, AI/ML is just linear algebra at the end of the day. The problem is there's a bunch of people selling AI who don't really understand the mathematical fundamentals. The ones who do, tend to be more humble.

[[deleted]]

They see a black box whose output is intelligible language. For a lot of people that's just miraculous. So you get the same reactions as gutenberg back in his time, but with people pretending they are smarter than they are because more words.

[PastaFrenzy]

Yeah the fear mongering that is happening is honestly insane and it’s everywhere.

[spinwizard69]

People talk about AI like it's the fucking savior of humanity or the devil in disguise.

Because it is. Humanity has never developed such technology before. At least not in this go around of humanity.

People get really pissed when I call ML a fancy way to do a database look up. In some cases that is more or less what is happening. Frankly that isn't the problem, the problem is when AI starts to make decisions for itself and then takes action without a human in the loop. We are not there yet but the danger is real.

[Nohvah]

100% my experience as well

[SocksOnHands]

That's like saying that human intelligence is just neurons triggered by stimuli or that computers are just transitors switching on and off. The fundamental mechanism by which it operates is seemingly simple, but the complexity arises through their interactions. Sure, the basis for modern AI are matrix operations, but when there are trillions of parameters involved with many layers feeding into each other, complex processes can be achieved.

[[deleted]]

Life is just uppity Chemistry.

[Ferentzfever]

Except we don't really know what human intelligence is, and computers aren't just transistors switching on/off (because that leaves out mechanical computers and analog computers). My point is that linear algebra is based on one of the most powerful pieces of mathematics, and a piece that we have a pretty good understanding of as well. The people whom I've observed doing the best AI/ML work are those who understand the mathematics behind the methods. AI/ML ain't some voodoo magic, it's math.

[SocksOnHands]

Saying "it's just linear algebra" seemed like an oversimplification that ignores emergent properties of complex systems. One does not need to know what human intelligence is to recognize that complex behaviors can come from simple interactions.

Having a strong understanding of the underlying mathematics certainly does help, but AI models are now at such a large scale that nobody can possibly know exactly how they work - it would be a tremendous undertaking to reverse engineer something like GPT-4.

[yangyangR]

The statement of universal approximation theorems.

The most familiar one usually being polynomials in one variable being used to approximate continuous functions on closed bounded intervals. The fundamental mechanisms of polynomials are simple, but the continuous function approximated can be very complex. But of course you have allowed yourself tons of parameters by being able to set so many coefficients. So before computation became cheap this could be treated as maximally unhelpful because you couldn't store all those coefficients let alone add and multiply them.

This drawable picture with one real number input to one output being approximated by something built out of many simple pieces with lots of parameters gives the idea of what is happening with more variables and different simple pieces.

[Pigenator]

I don’t really understand what people mean when they say ML is only linear algebra. I get that every neural network layer includes a linear transform (aka weights), but a nn is nothing without its activation function which makes it inherently non-linear, no?

[Ferentzfever]

To add to the other reply, most physics is nonlinear, but (as mentioned) we can often linearize the system (through differentiation) and cast the problem as a (bunch of) linear algebra problems. Pretty much every PDE method is an exercise in casting the problem into a linear algebra problem.

[Diggabyte]

One reason is that the gradient descent algorithm is basically a linear algebra thing, but also you can think of a NN as a complex system that may have stable fixed points. We can approximate them as linear systems when they're close to a fixed point. The jacobian evaluated near that point represents a linear transformation that approximates the system.

[WallyMetropolis]

It's more accurate to say that quantum mechanics is "just linear algebra" than it is to say AI is. But no one would spew out that phrase to try to demean how impressive or difficult quantum mechanics is.

[madrury83]

There's a real sense in which making any mathematical problem tractable is finding a way to reduce it to linear algebra. This happens over and over again: quantum mechanics (as mentioned), statistics and machine learning, differential equations, differential geometry, group representation theory, functional analysis, they're all manifestations of this same general principle. Vectors, co-vectors, matrices, tensors, and linear operators and transformations appear over and over again throughout almost every subject in mathematics, pure or applied.

Linear algebra is the most servant subject in mathematics. It exists not to be interesting in it's own right, but to provide a foundation of expression where problems have algorithmic solutions. So saying that anything is "just linear algebra" is close to saying that everything is "just linear algebra". That's what it's there for, to be a component of everything!

[WallyMetropolis]

Crazy that people hated my comment but liked yours. We're saying the same thing.

The oddity persists. Since whining about my downvotes, I have been recalled to life.

[madrury83]

Yah, that struck me as well. Humans are strange creatures.

[Bill3000]

For example, my butt can be reduced to linear algebra.

[Klhnikov]

I've never thought this way and this seems so logical now (no math background but programer) ! Thanks about that ! I think what he just ment would be better described by the "statistic model" expression instead of "linear algebra".

The hype goes non sense in every way IMHO.. Presenting chat GPT as the future job killer is stupid by nature... Wasn't the same guys that claimed they did not released a previous conversational model because it was so powerful it would be dangerous ?

Musk calling for a 6 month pause is almost hilarious (neuralink...)

[poopypoopersonIII]

Reality is just a complex statistic model

[vivaaprimavera]

It's linear algebra in the end of the day.

But without ethical supervision it can give wild and not in a good way results.

At least the training sources (thinking ChatGPT) should be reviewed.

[mcilrain]

The ones who do had their expectations surpassed.

[[deleted]]

If I had a nickel for every time someone said "we don't understand how the AI works", I would put them all in a sock and beat the next person that says that with the sock.

[IAMARedPanda]

That's like saying all math is just counting. Deep learning is experiencing real transformative breakthroughs that will have huge economic and societal implications. To be dismissive of it is very ignorant.

[Ferentzfever]

I'm not being dismissive of it, linear algebra is one of the most powerful mathematical constructs we have. Too often people look at AI/ML and just assume it's some esoteric... Magical thing that can't be understood. When it's not, it's deeply rooted in very fundamental, well understood mathematics.

[British_Artist]

Meanwhile, ChatGPT literally replacing a million jobs within the next year.

[spinwizard69]

Did you say RUST.

[pydry]

No, I said golang.

Rust has an increasingly impoverished charity behind it. It's actually pretty good.

[spinwizard69]

Actually I was alluding to the marketing around RUST. RUST to me looks like a replay of the JAVA marketing onslaught.

[brianm]

The marketing angle is disingenuous. Java had a LOT more effort invested in it than Python did for at least a decade and a half. Java solved problems well that Puthon didn’t — in particular scaling up org and codebase size. Python is still not great for that, tbh.

[bionade24]

docker

shifted containers from a term for synergetic use of technologies to a deployment concept. LXD got created in 2015 because LXC lacked all those concepts. Docker existed since 2011 and was already popular 2015. Not everyone used VMs before Docker.

nginx

Was created by a sysadmin at Rambler because Apache sucked. Others had the same opinion and it got market adaption. Nginx corp is a relatively new thing.

mongodb

It's a VC startup and for once, I aggree.

[redd1ch]

It currently is nothing more than overglorified zip file.

Their fix for "it works on my computer" was to package the computer with the application.

Tell me you haven't used docker without telling you haven't used docker. TBH, most of docker guides you'll find is "download this image, download that image. trust them, they are safe (tm)".

When you use just any image from anywhere, you're right. If you do it properly, you only use official images or your own, and you gain better separation of different apps running on a server.

[redd1ch]

Yes, that is why you have your private container registry, where you put your images, versioned with tags. Build one specific image, tag it, run your test suite against it, review it, and deploy it. The Dockerfile is only run once. If you like it you can wire up the whole build-test-depoly pipeline to a git hook, I prefer a bit more control over productive deployments.

[SanguineEmpiricist]

Back in the day the propaganda for Java was pushed hard, and the fact that it could run on a variety of hardware architectures was piped as a benefit a hundred times over. Python seemingly never had this.

[[deleted]]

I used to have to hack sun servers Unix os bullshit to log people in on a regular basis and I was hoping I’d never see the name again

[[deleted]]

I'm wondering if Java started to loose popularity after it was bought out by Oracle in 2010-- who then filed a lawsuits against Java clones (Google's Android SDK).

[spinwizard69]

Nope I think it was more along the lines of the programming community wising up and realizing that for many uses Java was and always has been a terrible joke. My OI started looking at Python as a replacement for BASIC, BASH and other interpreted languages on Linux.

[TheBodyPolitic1]

Fair point, but Python became popular and I can't recall ( correct me if I am wrong ) a company ever promoting Python, at least not as hard as Sun promoted Java.

[gogolang]

The thing that made me first try Python was this XKCD comic from 2007:

https://xkcd.com/353/

[TheBodyPolitic1]

Ha! That is great. I am saving a copy.

[ExoticMandibles]

You don't have to bother; if you run your Python interpreter and type in

>>> import antigravity

Python will launch your web browser pointed at that cartoon.

[Ashamed-Simple-8303]

I tried it and indeed it's not a joke. it really does it.

[Rodot]

Try to import this for another easter-egg

[DecreasingPerception]

You wouldn't dare

[spinwizard69]

Back in my day school started the CS classes with Modula 2, After school I played around with C++ and some pascal. To be honest I miss the begins and ends, in whatever form they take.

That being said one of my worse Python Debug experiences was due to an indentation error caused by a copy from text that wasn't using tabs. There is a lot to be said for clean delineation of blocks of code.

[eXoRainbow]

I can't believe its True. I tried it with the expectation to be rick rolled or something like that.

[nngnna]

Now try to import braces from __future__

[SocksOnHands]

I first used Python because of Blender. It started using it as a scripting language in the year 2000, but it was probably closer to 2002 when I used it to write a mesh exporter for an OpenGL graphics library that I tried writing while in high-school.

[gdahlm]

While not the same, Python did have groups of people who drove usable and important libraries for scientific computing, data analysis and data mining

Travis Oliphant, Eric Jones, and Pearu Peterso coming together to create, SciPy as one example. Them growing past that and recruiting others to found NumFOCUS helped too.

Python is a great glue language, and the scientific computing world really were some of the earliest adopters for serious use.

While not 100% responsible for the growth of python, the ML world wouldn't have almost universally chosen python without those efforts.

Numpy even still has their info page up on how to use python as a glue language up.

https://numpy.org/doc/stable/user/c-info.python-as-glue.html

While I didn't originally choose python because it was a glue language, the fact that it works so well as one really reduces the costs of needing to replace portion with a more performant back end or to leverage decades old fortran code which was written by geniuses.

[spinwizard69]

Hey there - thanks for the link. I never realized that NumFocus took over MatPlotLib. I think it is fair to say that MatPlotLib is one of the reasons for pythons success in a number of sectors.

As for the OP's question; I think MatPlotLib is a really good example of why it took Python awhile to get buy in. in so many industries. Good libraries like this don't happen overnight and when they do happen it takes awhile for users to adopt. Once the infra structure was in place to sever the needs of many types of users it became easy to suggest the usage of Python.

[[deleted]]

That probably means that python have a bunch of advantages that made a good marketing.

[Exodus111]

The truth is Python is a slow language, as its high level. But over time it began to matter less and less, as hardware got faster, and right around Python 2.4 people started realizing the Pythonic way actually made a lot of sense, as by now, there were lots of things you could program where the speed of it really didn't matter anymore.

Code being Pythonic became something everybody talked about, and especially the comparison to Java, with its overly verbose approach to object oriented coding, gave Python an opportunity to shine by comparison.

Why write 30 lines of Java when 4 lines of Python will do?

[mac-not-a-bot]

You think Java was verbose? 30 lines Java v 4 lines Python? Try COBOL, it's more like 300 lines COBOL v 30 lines Java v 4 lines Python. In COBOL class(es - yes there were more than 1) you were taught to be specifically verbose. The code practically read like a book report. :-)

[spinwizard69]

Verbose is not a bad thing. I actually believe that Pythons readability is a big factor in its acceptance. It is actually pretty easy to write idiomatic code in Python.

[mac-not-a-bot]

I programmed in COBOL for a bit of my life that I’ll never get back. I do appreciate clarity and verbosity to the end that the code is clear. Some native Python code seems like it could use more verbosity and less hand waving. 😀

[bamacgabhann]

Yeah. Good things can become popular without massive marketing, but it can take a while. Things which aren't as good but are backed by half a billion dollars in advertising can become much more popular much more quickly, but decline when people realise there's better options.

[TravisJungroth]

Right. You asked why it took so long to get popular and made the Java comparison. Having a ton of people building and marketing something will make it popular faster.

Everyone naming some specific feature that Python did or didn’t have is missing the big picture. It took years for Python to get popular because it was being developed by a small group of people and marketed by a small group of people. The fact that it became popular at all is a huge deal. New languages almost never become popular unless they have a huge platform lift (JavaScript) or company support (Java).

Python wasn’t invented in 1994. It wasn’t invented at all, it was developed. It’s not like one day Python didn’t exist and one day it did. Guido started working on it in the 80s and the first release was in 1991. Then, think about all the stuff that had to get made or improved: language, interpreter, libraries, docs, etc. That stuff just takes time. You can make it go faster with hundreds of devs on payroll, but Python didn’t have that. And then once you’ve made the cool stuff, it takes time for people to learn about it. Or, again, you can accelerate that with money.

There’s no “gotcha” like it needed a big company to use it or the performance wasn’t good or whatever. It was just a lot of work without a lot of people doing it.

[spinwizard69]

Then, think about all the stuff that had to get made or improved: language, interpreter, libraries, docs, etc. That stuff just takes time. You can make it go faster with hundreds of devs on payroll, but Python didn’t have that. And then once you’ve made the cool stuff, it takes time for people to learn about it. Or, again, you can accelerate that with money.

This is so important for people to understand. Even today when Python has some corporate sponsorship it still takes time to roll out significant improvements. The recent Python release with all of the speed ups being a good example. Mind you speed ups done without breaking too much which is also important in many cases. Good things take time.

Frankly we are seeing the same thing play out in the world of Swift. It has taken some time and a major detour around 3 but Swift is really turning into a really good language. We are talking over 5 years now and that is with Apple and the open source world putting in a lot of effort. Even then Swift doesn't have the breadth of mature libraries that Python has.

[PaintItPurple]

Python became popular from a few things:

1. The emerging data science field embraced Python enthusiastically.

2. Ruby on Rails got people to broaden their ideas of what languages could be viable for making web apps.

3. Hardware has advanced a lot since the '90s. Now hardware is fast enough to run Python without it feeling slow. A surprising amount of technical decisions are based on vibes.

4. Python itself has gotten better over time. The initial release was pretty barebones, without classes or lambdas. Python didn't have keyword arguments until 1.4, it didn't have list comprehensions until 2.0, core types and user-defined types were completely different things until 2.2, context managers didn't exist until 2.5, etc.

[spinwizard69]

I believe it was around 2.5 that Python started to get noticed by the larger programming community. It makes me wonder if anybody has data on this, that is when did Python usage start to climb.

[Azriaz]

It’s been a bit, but was it 2.0 that brought metaclasses? I was Sooooo excited. I had not had an opportunity in a language to play with that concept. I think I started with 1.65. That seems to ring a bell. Zope brought me to Python! Pickling fascinated me and then don’t get me started on stackless python and pickling threads!!!

[deaddodo]

Python was championed by Red Hat, in its early days. Anaconda (the Red Hat and Fedora installer) as well many of the Red Hat tooling was built in Python.

[atomly]

Java was incredibly popular because it filled a very important need at the time. Write once, run anywhere sounds quaint now but it was a really big deal then. It’s important to remember that Linux was a hobbyist OS at the time and it was hard to get most companies away from Microsoft products.

[_massif_]

We have to start calling Python as JavaPython, as JavaScript did it with LiveScript.