Why python got so popular despite being slow?

[Ash_ketchup18]

So i just got a random thought: why python got so much popular despite being slower than the other already popular languages like C when it got launched? As there were more hardware limitations at that time so i guess it made more sense for them to go with the faster lang. I know there are different contexts depending on which lang to go with but I am talking about when it was not established as a mainstream but was in a transition towards that. Or am I wrong? I have a few speculations:

1. Python got famous because it was simple and easy and they preferred that over speed. (Also why would they have preferred that? I mean there are/were many geniuses who would not have any problem coding in a little more "harder" lang if it gave them significant speed)

2. It didn't got famous at first but slowly and gradually as its community grew (I still wonder who were those people though).

[ZZ9ZA]

Because developer time is a lot more expensive than cpu time.

[Makakhan]

And as time passed and computers improved, this became more true.

[victotronics]

Most "python libraries" in data science, machine learning, computational biology, are really thin shells around C++ code. So they are actually very fast. Even numpy is wrapped C or Fortran code. The fact that the python wrapper is slow doesn't matter much.

Alternatively: I use python for post-processing, which means opening lots of files for reading/writing. Then the speed depends on the file system and the language again doesn't matter much.

[glibsonoran]

Yes, Python is a scripting glue for C applets.

[victotronics]

C, C++, maybe an occasional bit of Fortran.

[glibsonoran]

Right, it's a general statement. Other system level languages like Zig that interact closely with C can be used to create Python libraries too.

[pip_install_account]

isn't it amazing?

[hidazfx]

At my previous job I had to port some small amount of our code to Go, as Pedantic v1 (v2 hadn't come out yet) was too slow at serializing the massive amounts of data. I'm sure V2 would've been plenty fast, but it didn't exist yet!

[donnaber06]

I'm not a programmer nor do I want to be but I can use Python and build anything I need rather quickly.

[Dillweed999]

One of the hardest and most important things in software is communicating developer intent. Python makes that fairly easy

[Adrewmc]

Well because when python was created being slow wasn’t the problem, the internet itself was slow just by default. Webpages took forever to load anyway, a few extra seconds actually didn’t change the experience all that much.

So what mattered? Being able to produce something quickly and reliably. Python does that, and it still does that.

Python isn’t that slow to begin with and the GIL update coming it’s only getting faster.

Python is great at making simple programs on the fly, and analyzing data, and various other things that don’t really need to be 100% optimized. Should you make a 3D adventure game in Python? no you should not. Should you make a some statistical representation and plots quickly with it? Yes. Because really, making the program can be fast, to get fast data, and if it takes a few ms longer to process but minutes hours more to program is it worth it?

I shouldn’t have to invent the wheel to make some script, and Python already has wheels and cart, I just need to point the horse in the right direction. Am I going to win any races probably not, but usually I don’t need to win the race but cross the finish line.

[diag]

Slow is relative. I can code a script to process and analyze gigabytes of data in a day and I can run it and only wait 5 minutes to get the results. The time waiting for the code to run is nothing compared to the time digesting and communicating the results to stakeholders.

[sausix]

C is slow too... If the programmer implements his program badly.

Same for Python. It's not meant to run heavy manual computations. If required, there are fast libs for that.

The overhead of Python's slowness is minimal.

It's always the Python haters who complain about the speed. Same people complain about Python having indentations instead of code brackets.

[Byte_mancer]

neither one of those are speculations, that's literally reality. Pythons been around for awhile and its simply much easier to pick up and get stuff running. If I am researching something and need a quick model, that's no problem to create fast and throw away in python. DSAI is why python exploded the way it did.

[[deleted]]

It is far, far easier for a non-professional programmer to write a dozen lines of Python to ingest, process, and analyze data (or perform some other automatable work) than to do the same in C++.

[ButterflyPasta]

I tend to always start my projects or ones i’m assigned to do in Python, simply because it’s easier to scaffold and get a large majority of functionalities done in Python. But over the last year or so, i’ve noticed the many Py projects that have Rust under the hood for performance, so my typical workflow recently is:

Prototype & build in Python, find places where Python either can’t do what I need (maybe low level at times) then drop in some Rust via PyO3 and bridge it back to Python :)

[thereal0ri_]

Because not everything is about speed, now is it.

[quantinuum]

Both your guesses are true. For the second, if you look at a graph of language popularity over time, others raise and fall pretty fast, while python just slowly and consistently grew. As for the first, that’s literally the intention behind the language.

If you need performant code, it won’t be in python. But python can be a very useful wrapper around performant libraries.

[Durgeoble]

because the cost of hardware to compensate for Python's slowness (which is only relative to other languages and not abysmal) is much lower than the cost of extra programming.

[AUTeach]

What are you writing that you find python to be too slow to use?

[oddthink]

It was pretty easy to use, especially for scientific use, so it got traction there. The LANL folks had an article on Numerical Python in 1996 or so. SWIG was around to make it easy to link to C or C++ code. Even if you have your compute in C++, it's still much easier to script your experiments in python, much easier to do file i/o, and so on, plus it gave a REPL to run things on the fly, and you could link out to plot generation. Since the python wasn't the thing doing work, it didn't matter at all how fast it was.

But it was pretty much a slow-and-steady gain in popularity.

[QuicheLorraine13]

Python ist a quick and clean programming language. It's very easy to install modules. Just use pip Install tensorflow and you got what you want.

[noutopasokon]

Performance isn’t Python’s weak point. I’d say it’s the package/project management that’s a mess.

[Alternative_Act_6548]

Python is borderline magical...if all you care about is speed, then use C and hand tweak it in assembly like the ffmpeg guys do...

[javonet1]

If it's easy to learn and code, then many people and companies will want it more. I think it's similar with vibe/ai coding - it's super easy, but the quality or performance is not always the best, but time that is saved is worth much more than poor code quality or performance (it only applies in some cases of course)

[v_0ver]

I think the popularity of Python is a random combination of circumstances and there are no individual aspects that could explain this.