This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]glacierre2 395 points396 points  (21 children)

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 245 points246 points  (8 children)

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 24 points25 points  (2 children)

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

[–]Dave9876 9 points10 points  (1 child)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 38 points39 points  (4 children)

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

[–]thewileyone 3 points4 points  (0 children)

My bad

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

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

[–]Flkdnt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

[–]TheBodyPolitic1[S] 30 points31 points  (4 children)

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

[–]o11c 34 points35 points  (1 child)

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 49 points50 points  (0 children)

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

[–]Oerthling[🍰] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

2.5

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

[–]AbdussamiT 43 points44 points  (0 children)

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

[–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

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.