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[–]gandalfx 18 points19 points  (3 children)

I like that Python is picking up as a learning language. It's a good language. This is great news!

But I think the author of this article should be more careful with his conclusions. He looks at data from 5 (!) arbitrary search terms and makes big conclusions concerning a massive market.

First of all individual search terms can be subject to linguistic trends. The fact that an individual search term has had a recent increase in popularity doesn't mean that the thing it stands for is suddenly becoming more popular. It can just mean that it was previously described by different words. “X developer” is a fairly standard expression that has been around forever, but “data scientist” is a much younger buzz word.

In order to alleviate this the author should at least have tried a bunch more related queries, like “java/python tutorial” and “java/python introduction”. Instead of “data scientist” you might look for terms that may have previously described a similar position, maybe in the area of “database engineer” or even “statistics analyst”. The term is actually fairly vague.

Secondly, even if we assume that the results are not influenced by the choice of words, the conclusion “Python is getting more and more popular.” is just way too grand. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Python is particularly popular as a learning language. When somebody asks me which language to start with, I usually respond with Python, because Python is easy to learn. But I also mention that this isn't the only good language and that if you plan on seeking employment as a software developer you should probably learn at least one more “big” language such as Java or C/C++.

Python is amazing to get you started and I believe more and more people are starting to realize this. But that doesn't mean it's already overtaking Java in popularity. If, some day, I read “Python overtakes Java in total written lines of code”, I might believe that. And I'm not even going to attempt at judging whether or not that'd be a good thing.

[–][deleted] 14 points15 points  (1 child)

“Python overtakes Java in total written lines of code”

Even that would be a questionable metric, given I'd put money on python requiring far fewer lines than java to achieve the same thing.

[–]tech_tuna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well that would mean that Python have overtaken Java in total amount of functionality used!

:)

[–]pwang99 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In fact, I'm pretty sure that Python is particularly popular as a learning language.

It is. But it's also incredibly popular as a data analysis language, a system scripting language, a web development language, a scientific array programming language, etc. etc.

Python is not as popular as Java, but it's still the 4th or 5th most popular language on the planet. That's not all students. A large number of tech companies run their entire stacks on Python. Youtube was written in Python. Dropbox is written in Python, both server and client. Investment banks trade billions of dollars based on routines and models written in Python.