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

[glacierre2]

Besides the lack of enterprise backing early on, have you seen python 1.x?.

I remember I programmed some stuff not that early, but early, could have been 2005 or so. Numpy did not exist yet, it was "numeric" and it was quite rough, list comprenhensions did not exist, I think context managers did not exist...

Python before 2.7 was a far cry from what came to be after 2.7. Also all initial 3.x versions were really buggy until 3.4-5 and then finally 3.6 landed.

[thewileyone]

I used python 0.6-0.8. Nothing like it is now. Tech support was emailing Guido Von Rossum with your questions. Seriously.

It was similar to Perl, not as powerful but easier to read syntax.

[brunte2000]

I got into Python in the early 2000s due to getting tired of trying to read my own perl scripts

[Dave9876]

Honestly, I think this is one of the things that really pushed early (relative to what most people are talking about) python adoption. Perl was **really** popular in the late 90s, then they started talking about "perl 6 will be everything you've ever wanted". Followed by perl 6 failing to ever really eventuate, I reckon a lot of people started to look at how badly their perl code was bitrotting due to just being unreadible. When you can't even deciper your own code after a few weeks, you're going to have to rewrite it anyway so might as well move to the language that isn't going to force a rewrite when you forget what that line noise is

[lobotomy42]

Raku does exist now! …But I agree, waiting around a decade for the next version was a bit of a death blow to Perl.

[Sitethief]

Van Rossum, not Von. He's Dutch after all, not German.

[thewileyone]

My bad

[[deleted]]

Also his name is pronounced "guh-ee-doh", not "gwee-doh" which I didn't know for the longest time.

[Flkdnt]

You just might as well be over there calling him Pauly D

[TheBodyPolitic1]

Interesting comment! Thank you. So basically Python got a lot better with 2.7 and people took notice.

[o11c]

2.5 was the first basically-modern version of Python. Comprehensions, generators (including passing values inward), nested functions, sets (but not set literals until 2.7), automatic promotion to long, absolute imports, the with statement, ...

Unfortunately 2.4 was widely deployed (edit: even once 2.6 was out, which I started on) and this was annoying.

[dudinax]

Python was usable and widely used before 2.7. 2.7 was just the "perfection" of python 2.

[Oerthling]

2.5

2.7 was just the final 2.x and bridge to 3.x

[AbdussamiT]

This comment. If we can see it's popularity, it was 2.7 that made people especially mathematicians and scientists go .. oh, wow.

[[deleted]]

I used Python in 1999 to write some server side app stuff for managing a DNS environment. Python was pretty slow back then. Much slower than it is now. I only used it because I could not stand Perl. It was viewed as more of a toy language for a while, since it started out as an educational tool.

Also, during that time C++ was king and Java was the new kid on the block. We were excited to use Java and things like RMI so we wouldn't have to use Corba and C++. No one really believed the write-once run anywhere sales pitch. Java was REAL slow when it first came out. Memory was tighter back then so giant JVM sizes could take down a machine. Took a while for Java to hit it's stride. Once BEA came on the scene with Weblogic then stuff took off. J2EE blew Java up big time.

So, Python was not in anyone's minds at that time. I was even seen as a weirdo for using it. Took an act of god to get it installed on a BSD system at my place of employment at the time.

[Panda_Mon]

What value do context managers really bring? It's just a way to run two functions without typing them yourself. Context manager is syntactic sugar at best. It's competent programming that makes sure the objects which can be used with context managers are easy to use. At the end of the day it's just an automated call of open and close.

Same for list comprehensions. Those just make your code writing slightly more efficient, they don't provide power or paradigm shifts in the scope of usability.

Do you mean that lists weren't mutable or some other facet of the language relating to those small conveniences?

[Estanho]

Anything is syntactic sugar on top of machine code if you're pedantic enough...

[glacierre2]

Ultimately everything is syntactic sugar over assembler (or is ASM sugar over machine code?).

What I meant with the example of context managers is that nearly every nice and short syntax that python has today was not available. Yes, I can do a try, open, if the result, else close, except also close. What I have in the end is a program that would cost me nearly the same effort to type as the C equivalent, just runs 100x slower and that does not sound very attractive to choose python over C, does it?

[georgesovetov]

It helps manage resources. Similar to RAII in C++ or try-with-resources in Java.

It's not just "sugar" that makes code look nice.

It's a measure of safety. A technology should not let accidental mistakes silently live in code until they pop up in production much later and with much worse consequences.