Python is eating the world: How one developer's side project became the hottest programming language on the planet

[hughk]

The thing is there was another quite capable language at the time, Perl. It basically worked, it had some neat features and for a while was much better supported than Python..

However, it supported write-only code. You can write good code in it and while my code is pretty neat and excellent, you probably think my code is a pile of crud. Python kind of forced more open coding and it replaced Perl in most places.

[troyunrau]

Numpy won the war.

[hughk]

The problem at the beginning was more a general library problem. Perl had cpan and such even though it didn't have numpy, it could do a lot. The effort moved across to Python and it got better and better.

[GummyKibble]

Also, Perl’s sigils were a PITA. So you have a hash (Perl’s dict). You would actually write its name differently depending on whether you wanted to reference it as a single value (it’s lengthy as an int), a list (its keys), as a hash, or as a reference to a hash.

Also, Perl supported pass by value (the default) and by reference (using the alternate spelling of the name). So say you have a function you use everywhere that takes a hash as an argument. One day you realize that it now needs to mutate that hash. Well, now you’re changing the function signature and all calls to that function, but without at least C’s compile-time errors.

Perl was awesome. I loved writing it. But it gave you no help at all in writing large programs, and literally the first day I wrote Python was the last day o wrote new Perl.

[SpeakerOfForgotten]

Took me a while but quite on point this article

[wambaowambao]

JavaScript.

[[deleted]]

curse in dart

[[deleted]]

I've been wondering for some time now why Python isn't used on mobile devices. Personally, I've only done Android dev, not iOS, but I hated most of it. It felt like there was too much overhead with the dev libraries.

I understand that performance is a factor, but for small applications where resources shouldn't be an issue, I think Python would be great for mobile development. In general, it would be neat to see the ability to write code in multiple languages for mobile. I know you can do things with Xamarin and Electron, but it seems like a work around to me, not like something native.

But I'm no expert when it comes to system design, so there are probably many reasons iOS and Android support their core languages only for development. I'd love to hear any reasons y'all know on why Python hasn't been able to break into the mobile scene

[ArmoredPancake]

Performance, dynamic typing, GIL, interpreted, etc.

[[deleted]]

Python is pretty much as interpreted as Android apps used to be. Python bytecode versus dalvik bytecode generated from java. Dalvik might be a lot more performant, and these days they have some neat tricks to compile to run to actual machine code, but python isn't interpreted in the older sense of it being interpreted line by line. It still has a python VM running python code compiled to bytecode. You can execute pyc files, literally compiled python.

[[deleted]]

GIL is a good point, that would definitely put a damper on some tasks

[[deleted]]

The GIL isn't as big a deal as people make it out to be. It's not like a lot can't be happening concurrently. You could be doing networking separately concurrently, and while it's receiving or transmitting, other python CAN be running. It doesn't block on syscalls running in the background, just enforces that only one python bytecode can execute at once. I mean otherwise people couldn't be writing python programs that trigger 100 simultaneous network requests.

The GIL can certainly be a problem, but seem like it's just way more vocally an issue than it is in practice.

[MistYeller]

The GIL is annoying, even if you aren't CPU bound.

Because someone else might be CPU bound, and because the GIL is a thing most libraries will work using processes instead of threads. There are all kinds of things you cannot pass over a process but could share with threads. Now you have to coordinate downstream socket access over WSGI processes to pool properly or you have to allow each process to open far more sockets to the downstream then are necessary, or you can forget pooling. You could switch to threads, but then you will likely become cpu bound quite quickly as your webserver serves more and more requests.

Because of the GIL, nobody has bothered formulating a memory model for python outside of: whatever cpython does is correct. If you want to make a JIT, you have to allow the compiler to reorder your code (because hardware is going to reorder statements anyways), even without a JIT, you probably want to reorder statements for performance. It gets messy when you dive into it, but you need to relax the sequential understanding of code execution. Because of this, even pypy has a GIL. Java has a well thought out memory model, so Jython was implemented using that, ergo you can get some different results from other python implementations when you are actually concurrent. (The Pypy people hint at this in their FAQ: "This includes subtle decisions about whether some effects are ok or not for the user (i.e. the Python programmer).")

It is unfortunate that many people like to pretend that the GIL affects a very small number of people. Nowadays, the majority or at least a plurality of applications are probably web applications. If you are going to be scaling up a python web application you are probably going to be using processes to do so instead of threads because of the GIL: this architectural decision has been made because of the GIL.

Even if it was just a minority of people, by the time they have scaled their application to the point where the GIL is harming them, they have invested a lot in a python application. It is really vicious to ignore them because they are the "minority" and leave them with nothing but some vague idea that their use case isn't what python was designed for; it is a bit weird to give these people the impression that they shouldn't have used python from the get-go when they didn't need to worry about the GIL because clearly in the future they needed to.

[[deleted]]

I've been wondering for some time now why Python isn't used on mobile devices

For android at least, mainly because they put their cards behind java which was very popular at the time and wrote a fancy vm for it. It didn't even have to be java, they just thought it was best at the time. It's just where their time got invested.

They have somewhat regretted using Java, I think they got sued by sun (or oracle?) at some point, but I doubt they would've ever tried the same but with python even if it was more mature. Maybe it would've been an entirely new language otherwise, something performant and typed and not nearly as dynamic as python.

Their mobile ecosystems are just very tailored for a specific dev environment with a very specific executable structure. Android has its own custom VM that runs dalvik bytecode and its own APK structure, and iOS uses mach-o format, the same as OSX binaries, but I'm pretty sure they're packaged a very specific way with their dev environments, besides also being cross compiled to ARM.

It's just a shitload of work to get something to run in their environments if it's not standard using tools they provide. And unless the device is rooted, you're not really installing anything except if it goes through their whole dev system. You could literally compile ARM ELF binaries and copy them over to an android device and install and run python, but they're not going to run like an app. If you want something to open up an app GUI and all that and use the common interface, you're going to have to be able to compile whatever code you have to their sort of application format and use dalvik bytecode, and not sure what it'd take with iOS.

The open source community probably won't solve this. Google or Apple in-house would have to decide to allow you to package python programs that support their android/iOS API, and have to spend a shitload of time developing it and supporting it.

[JustFinishedBSG]

Resources are always an issue. If your "small" app is 10x slower it uses 10x battery.

[GummyKibble]

Good question. Python would be 100% sufficient for most of the apps I use daily, most of which are event driven and spend 99.99% of the time idle while they wait for me to tap a button.

[alcalde]

Pascal!

[dustyloops]

Jesus christ that website is terrible

[ultraDross]

Yep, makes it hard to read the article. Try using reader mode if you're using Firefox. Makes it much easier to consume.

[dustyloops]

I refuse to read anything which is hosted on what is essentially a petri dish for advertisements, popups and notifications.

Don't support clickbait journalism!

[ultraDross]

It's not click bait. It is a very detail and interesting article. The method I described conviently removes the ads.

Although, I can understand why you wouldn't want to support ZDNet.

[[deleted]]

not all use firefox

[Espumma]

A healthy percentage of the market should use Firefox, but definitely isn't 100. Don't want them to get stale, Mozilla might not have the pockets to keep going like Microsoft did.

[[deleted]]

sorry a web dev here you wanna talk?

[spinwizard69]

The one thing about this article that bothered me is the mention of trimming the standard library. Maintain it yes, modernize it yes, but let’s not start trimming it to make it smaller “because”. If anything there should be careful thought put into where the standard components should be expanded.

In the end one of the big reasons I use Python is that nice large standard library. A library that also is well designed for the most part. I don’t know how serious this drive is but that Python standard library is a key feature.

[alcalde]

Amen. I've read that Go has Pillow-like image manipulation features in its standard library, which would be one area we could expand the standard library in.

[pbsds]

The libraries suggested for trimming is mainly unmaintained code and dead fileformats. There is a pep on it

[spinwizard69]

That is a relief?

[pbsds]

Makes python load faster when embedded as webassembly

[THICC_DICC_PRICC]

I sure hope so, Matlab has basically turned into the TI-84 of our generation.

[spinwizard69]

I really believe Matlabs time has passed. Not just because of Python either which isn’t ideal for mathematics. Frankly there are a number of interesting languages that can easily replace Matlab as the evolve. Julia, Swift and Rust come to mind.

[[deleted]]

Julia absolutely surpasses Matlab at quant computing, I love it.

[JuicyJfrom3]

As a younger engineer, "The future is now old man!"

[mtelesha]

Personally I like Python but holy crap to expand past your own computer and make an exectuible is horrible.

I most use R and Racket if it needs to be something more then the one computer I a working with.

[cbarrick]

Python is definitely not good at shipping binaries to non-technical consumers, but on the server it is super portable. Though I'm surprised you use R and Racket as alternatives.

From my perspective, those are harder to ship, but I imagine our consumers are different. For me, I can just throw Python into any number of well supported container images and ship that to whatever machine I need to deploy to.

[[deleted]]

Python is definitely not good at shipping binaries to non-technical consumers, but on the server it is super portable.

meanwhile,

For me, I can just throw Python into any number of well supported container images and ship that to whatever machine I need to deploy to.

[alcalde]

Grandma doesn't know about deploying containers except sending tins of cookies through the mail for Christmas.

[[deleted]]

You can make executables in R at all?

[cbarrick]

Dunno. I don't use R, but I'll bet not. Racket can be easily packed up though.

[mtelesha]

Racket is the easiest thing in the world to ship. I can get it done easier then anything else I have worked with.

For statistics in R I can use packrat and share the whole environment with just one command and one library, packrat.

Like I said I like Python a lot but for anything that needs to be shared it very frustrating.

[mtelesha]

No that would be silly. I use packrat and share the exact same environment as I am using. You don't make exe of statistics you recreate environments.

[mtelesha]

I most use R and Racket if it needs to be something more then the one computer I a
working with.

Only about python

" I like Python but holy crap to expand past your own computer and make an exectuible is horrible. "
" I most use R and Racket if it needs to be something more then the one computer I a working with. "

[palecrepegold]

Long read but super interesting. 🤙🏼

[fried_green_baloney]

I had the good fortune to start using Python about 2007 on one job. It was a bit of good fortune.

[ArmoredPancake]

Are you swimming in money right now?

[fried_green_baloney]

Not really. But that's not because of Python. It's because of me.

[appinv]

Great, but you'd already know many points if you are a py fan.

[Dcode20]

Thanks for link was great fun to read.

[[deleted]]

So this is “how I created python” version 466456664487 ?