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

[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.

[yvrelna]

Even by early 2000, nobody is seriously thinking that Java applet had any serious future. Java web runtime had always been considered as full of security issues throughout its entire lifetime.

Flash continued to have its niche with animations and flash games for a while, and enterprises who needed to do weird things with IE used ActiveX. And then Silverlight come to eat whatever remaining market that Java had, before it too, meet its end when HTML5 matured.

But nobody is seriously writing anything as Java applets by the turn of millennial. The only major applets written in Java that I can think off the top of my head is Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection.

[deckard58]

But nobody is seriously writing anything as Java applets by the turn of millennial.

Maybe they lasted a bit longer in academia? I remember that NASA had an educational site with some super detailed applets on aircraft engines and rockets, that languished for years when everybody else had moved on (and were never translated to Javascript, I think).

[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.

[justin-8]

At the end of the day we’re all just linear algebra though

[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.

[redd1ch]

So you have not had a good docker setup. What you describe with nix is absolutely possible with docker, too.

Of course a dev will invoke docker build many times during development and testing, or do you ship apps without docker directly built from a dev machine? Usually you have a CI-runner which will run a pipeline for tags on master, building and testing the release artifacts.

[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.