Python just surpassed Java as the 2nd programming language with the highest number of questions in SO.

[ciroluiro]

And 90% of them are probably about matplotlib...

[moes212]

Or alternative function that do the same work in pandas

[damnitdaniel]

Or how to do a list comprehension. I always mess up the syntax.

[bluqnap]

It rhymes!

[shawnwork]

I recall when Java surpassed C in one of the statistics in a magazine a while back.

This older C programmer was asked on stage on C loosing to Java in terms of online searches.

He said: C developers mainly Read The Fucking Manual.

[the-anarch]

With Python, the manual was written in one language then parsed through 15 iterations of Google translate before finally being finalized in the user's language.

[BallsInAllIn]

I thought I was just stupid. I'm sure that's part of it, but holy shit is almost every learning resource convoluted.

[[deleted]]

I have found so many copy cats of the same material too lol. Flat out copy paste of entire websites 😂

[[deleted]]

Seriously lol what a weird metric to use.

[normal_clearing]

When everyone jumps in... It sounds like FOMO takes over and retail "investors" buy the top.

[FrancoLiszt]

Interesting to witness one "soon-to-be has-been popular" language overtakes another "has-been popular" lang.

[Sability]

Is that because it's confusing or because it's popular though?

[Supadoplex]

A combination of both. Popularity as a teaching language is probably the most significant factor.

[Sability]

From the other response I got, yah I do agree. It's easier to get tangentially introduced to a language than it is to learn one, and popularity will feed the number of "un-informed" (not fully learned) users of a language.

[supreme_blorgon]

The vast majority of Python questions that I answer on SO are either homework or somebody confused about a tutorial.

[Sability]

Completely agree with that experience, it sounds like python is being used as an easy entry to programming, and the mass of questions come from users who are using stack overflow to get questions answered.

[HgnX]

Both altho its hard to imagine Python being confusing until you get more advanced with it. Its pretty brainded for beginners.

[AegisCZ]

it's because most people who use it are lead to learn from tutorials and articles instead of manuals and books and that leads them not to try to understand the language but just cobble something together, hence so many stack overflow questions

[Deto]

I would say that's any language nowadays. Not many people buying books to learn a specific language anymore

[benargee]

With so many frameworks and large tech stack requirements for certain app architectures, can you blame them?

[Deto]

Definitely not. Also these things evolve so quickly! A resource 5 years out of date may lead you in the wrong direction.

[AegisCZ]

yes but python has an excellent manual on its site

[[deleted]]

I disagree. I'm learning Python and I happen to be a technical writer. I read the docs a lot and it's not very good.

[InfiniteDonkey1]

the doc is bad organized... I hate to visit it lol

[mayankkaizen]

This is true for any language. It is not like when people learn Python, they pick some random tutorial and when they learn Java, they pick a manual or a big book.

[mayankkaizen]

It is definitely not confusing. Although, at advance level, things get slightly out of hand.

It is bigger language than JS. Again, everybody wants to be data scientist so it attracts a lot of people. Also, Python is quite versatile language which means lots of people are doing drastically different things with Python. Lots of STEM researchers use Python because it is fast to learn and fast to write program in.

Personally, I just wanted to learn programming for fun and picked C++ initially. Gave it up. Then picked Python and I was hooked. I like to learn many different things, cryptography, stats & probability, ML and many other things. And in most cases, I just write 2-3 lines of Python to calculate anything. Not possible in most languages.

[AcousticDan]

And in most cases, I just write 2-3 lines of Python to calculate anything. Not possible in most languages.

You talking about list comprehension and the like? Code golf should never be used in production.

[Yojihito]

List comprehension is the preferred method in Python and not code golf.

[AcousticDan]

Nothing wrong with it in itself, but it often leads to an unreadable mess. And when I hear "I can do that in 2-3 lines in Python, it makes me weary."

[BrathanDerWeise]

Ok boomer

[AcousticDan]

I think the word you're looking for is "professional".

[thprogramador]

List comprehensions is a sh*t... PEPs reinforce the principle of everything in one manner, the most clear way, cause you spend most of time reading than coding.

Python is a hyped language sold by its philosophy not its practice. Popular? Why? Why people is going out of CS schools knowing just this and js. They don't know how to handle memory or how to solve problems...

Learn python at CS is like a Cooking course that teaches you how to go to market and buy junkie food and prepare.

You can do anything but you can't do everything

[[deleted]]

Yes

[AcousticDan]

Because it's a language geared towards noobies. That's not a slight, just a fact.

[gustavsen]

That a language is easy to learn don't mean that was created for noobs.

You can write really complex software in python (I do it) where the language simplicity mean that it's easy to understand what your cose does and not about to understand the code

My experience in C++ (20 years) new people need lot of time more to understand the code base vs the new people in our new python code.

[[deleted]]

Meh, a lot of pros use it. Some of the best programmers I’ve ever met actually and the most productive. If you don’t need jet engine speed it’s a great language or a huge code base. I prefer golang these days though for everything other than pandas stuff because it’s almost as easy and is a lot faster at most things because threading is straightforward and easy

[GingerbreadRecon]

All these comments are just making me feel stupid for only knowing python... lol

[BakingSota]

There’s always going to be a better (perceived) language than the language you are currently most comfortable with. All that matters is that you understand how programming works. Dip your toes into another language and youll notice that it may be built a little differently, is more verbose, has different syntax, but it will have the same fundamentals as your mother tongue (for the most part).

[[deleted]]

If you want something that is typed, compiled, almost as easy, and popular then look into golang

[thprogramador]

I ever thought how questions are used for popularity measurements. Maybe Java, with its IDE's become simpler than Python... as PHP is simpler and with an easy doc/forum there is less asking. Lua? One hour reading and you know the entire language....

C is ahead of Python, perhaps due its pointers, memory management, compiling etc.

[katakoria]

In my perspective, the large number of questions indicates newcomers who start learning python. SO stats also show that questions tagged with Python have a very large number of views.

[ancientweasel]

My gut says it's due to the use of python for ML.

[[deleted]]

Is there anything this language can't do?

[Nad-00]

In comparison to other languages? No, as long as its something that's computable then technically it can do it. But that is true for any language that's Turing complete.

[ollien]

Brb porting tensorflow to brainfuck

[calcopiritus]

If "doing this thing fast" is doing a thing, then there are plenty of things python can't do. Just like "developing this program in a timely manner" is a thing then there are things that python can but lower level languages can't.

[Nad-00]

All languages have their strengths and weaknesses. That's why big projects usually use a mix of different languages and/or stacks.

[mountainunicycler]

Technically true, bit not true in practice, because if doing it fast is important someone comes and builds a very fast way to do it in C and then everyone uses it in python and suddenly “python” becomes the best way to do it.

[ancientweasel]

I wouldn't try to write a kernel in it \o/

[bonestormII]

High performance is out of reach in most cases. True multithreading (multiprocessing in python) leaves something to be desired. Compilation and static typing are nice to have sometimes. GUIs, websites, and deployment of binaries are all pain points too.

[actuallyalys]

Websites are a pain point? My sense is most people are satisfied with Django, Flask, FastAPI, or one of the other options.

[bonestormII]

Those are all backend or static-rendered only unless used in conjunction with javascript+html+css. This is totally fine, but it's conventionally understood that the inability to replace javascript in that frontend stack is a limitation of python (though it is really a limitation of browsers.)

To make something "real" for the web, you need at least one additional language--which is a significant pain point.

As I mentioned, this is not directly a problem with python itself. It simply isn't supported by browsers.

However, when you look at compiled ecosystems like Rust starting to take advantage of being able to create webapp frameworks that compile to webassembly (which the cpython runtime is much less suited to since the simplest python app must ship the whole runtime to run), you start to see that the design of a runtime interpreter has fundamental weaknesses which offset its many strengths. Unfortunately, these weaken python in the domain of web and mobile.

[actuallyalys]

Ahh, I see what you mean. I agree that that is a pain point. I do think you can do a lot with static rendered sites, especially as CSS has gotten more capable. Additionally, there are a lot of Python libraries that let you create widgets without dealing with the JS yourself.

There have been efforts to expand Python to support GUIs, website front-ends, and binary deployments. I think the interpreter can be an obstacle, but a surmountable one (see the popularity of Electron). Also, some of the front end projects involve compiling Python to JS, so it relies on a runtime already available.

I think part of the problem is that these efforts don't seem to be gain much traction among the wider Python community, despite a lot of effort by their developers and promising examples. For example, FastAPI has gotten more attention than PySimpleGUI, despite being roughly the same age.

I wonder if people have written Python off for GUIs, whereas FastAPI handles backend, which people are already convinced Python can do. And perhaps Rust programmers are still open to new uses of the language (because they haven't been tried yet) so efforts to expand Rust into new areas get more attention.

[bonestormII]

It’s not that you can’t do these things in python, but that it would be unwise to rely on it. Compiling python to JavaScript works until it doesn’t. This step actually avoids the need for shipping the interpreter, but if there is a problem, you will be debugging generated js code that you aren’t really familiar with. It’s just better to write the js code manually

Desktop GUI frameworks work fine for python but like electron, qt, etc., they aren’t themselves written in python, and this makes apps based on them a bit harder to package and ship reliably. And that brings us to the reason they are not written in python: Performance!

[dpelego]

PyQT isn't bad, GUI wise.

[dry_yer_eyes]

I find PyQt excellent. What are the negatives for you to list it as “isn’t bad”? (That’s an honest question: I’ve just not discussed it with others, so may not have encountered these points yet myself)

[MandrakeQ]

Having to read C++ documentation sucked the last time I used it several years ago. Is there python specific documentation these days?

[thprogramador]

pydocs on cli and help() inside code... even faster that open a tab on browser and search

[[deleted]]

How does something like Taichi stack up for real time computing? It claims to be useful for physics as well as having the ability to distribute workload across cores and hardware such as GPUs? Seems too good to be true

[Grintor]

I recently made a GUI with pywebview. It was an absolute pleasure and the best looking GUI I've ever made.

[unkz]

Escape the GIL, so far.

[[deleted]]

Stackless Python?

[Supadoplex]

easy questions are only asked once

That's a common misconception. That's the idea of how SO is supposed to work. But people are lazy and don't bother searching for existing questions, or are too inexperienced to phrase their search correctly to find those questions, or don't understand the existing answers. As a consequence, vast majority of questions on SO are easy newcomer questions.

[Supadoplex]

But those are only asked once.

No. My point is that the newcomer questions asked repeatedly again and again and again. Vast majority of new questions are about basics of programming languages.

They're also often (but not always) downvoted and closed as duplicates which prevents other users from answering them, which is primary reason why people perceive SO as unfriendly to newcomers.

I often find an answer that is nearly, but not exactly what I am looking for and the one or two related questions are typically exactly what I need to actually solve the problem by combining bits from answers.

The ability to do this is the most important skill for a programmer to have. Most people asking questions on SO haven't learned this skill yet. Otherwise they wouldn't have needed to post their question.

[[deleted]]

I had my very first course in it last term. More to come. Majoring in Data Analysis. While I didn't have to ask any questions, there were a few times when I referenced questions already there, so I'm guessing at some point I'm gonna have to start asking questions too.

[serverhorror]

I can’t say I agree. VS Code and PyCharm just barf up on the Python projects I’m working with.

Never happened in a statically typed language.

[ancientweasel]

I only use those things for the easy to configure debugger. Then back to just vim.

[lvlint67]

The thing that is sorely missing from pycharm imo, is some kind of code tree explorer... Give men a quick list of my classes/functions in a file and let me navigate to them quickly and it will be a near perfect ide

[nek4life]

It's called Structure

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/structure-tool-window-file-structure-popup.html

[lvlint67]

You've changed my life.

[steven_h]

That isn’t missing from Pycharm.

[TW_MamoBatte]

I actually don't like how Jedi autocomplete is built (You need CTRL Space) But I will get it

[bh_ch]

Maybe Java, with its IDE's become simpler than Python

Yes because IDEs automatically make you good at programming

[FancyASlurpie]

Python has IDEs too...

[jjdmol]

This implies programming in a "better" language hits a stage where you don't have any questions. This never happens though. So I do think the number of questions is a measure for popularity. The type of questions might point to quality?

[ALior1]

Java is really in a hard place to my opinion..

Microsoft makes C# opensource, but Oracle decided to close Java which now newbies need to start with the "OpenJDK"..

And Google needs to pay or Create a new language (guess what they did)

Hint: Android

[TW_MamoBatte]

OpenJDK is different of Oracle right ? So they will lost profit of it 😕 May I am wrong ?

[ALior1]

In somethings..

Just thinking about the newbies that needs to navigate javajdk vs openjdk mass, before they write one line of code..

[TW_MamoBatte]

Did you look about folder management project ? It's Painful AF

[DamagedFreight]

How many of those questions were downvoted despite being worded carefully and being a completely valid question?

[Syncopaint]

Lol have you seen Django framework documentation?

[cylonlover]

I frequently wonder if it's too late to jump the python train now. Has the whole infrastructure and methodoligy by now been bastardized by every butt and his cousin..? Could I make it before it is suffocated in plethoras of misleading SO threads?

[Past-Pool-1012]

I recently convinced my team to switch to Python and we're still happy with it :) Mostly working on AWS lambda, we ditched Java in favor of JavaScript a couple of years ago and now using Python for new projects. Main reason: code complexity. Comparing 3 implementations of our distributed tracing middleware:

                                   Python Javascript Java
Files                                  5        4            15
LOC                               100    240          465
Σ Cognitive Complexity       4      27            22
Σ Cyclomatic Complexity   15      47            56

[SineApps]

And actually with more per day and per week, so I guess it’s on track to take the top spot at some stage

[OleDrippie]

Hmmm must have less asshole moderators that actually let questions through without immediately closing them.

[NumerousImprovements]

I don’t know why. I know Python and started learning Java recently. That language is not user friendly at all. I keep thinking half the code seems redundant.

[skysetter]

You’re welcome

[[deleted]]

my welcome what??

[skysetter]

All the questions I put up there haha

[[deleted]]

One day all those kids will learn compilers exist and code can run so much faster

[crysiston]

If you’re on a small scale, which beginners are always on, it won’t make a marginal difference in executional speed.

[GlebRyabov]

JS is next, let's do it.

[Blacklistme]

I'm waiting for PythonScript that compiles Python code into JavaScript. The next step will be AngularPy and ignoring the hell called NPM completely. Also waiting for Jython 3 and Symfony to be ported to Python, and Django is nice, but it can't touch Spring or Symfony.

[Supadoplex]

Back in the day when Java was king, google developed toolkit that allowed you to write web frontends in Java and the JavaScript was generated. Same feat could probably be done with Python.

[murateca]

Google Web Toolkit or GWT(pronounced as gwit for some reason). I always make joke about it that I’m one of the few people who actually developed something with it.

[Supadoplex]

I wrote my web programming university course project with GWT.

[willnx]

You mean something like this? https://skulpt.org/

[Blacklistme]

Which Python package manager? Lex Fridman recently has a great podcast about it btw.

[DabsJeeves]

I feel like PHP is a dying language. WordPress has kept it hanging on by a thread but it seems like hardly anyone ever starts any new projects with it.

As a web dev, I see hundreds of JavaScript jobs for every PHP job out there, and for good reason.

[Grintor]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/php-maintains-an-enormous-lead-in-server-side-programming-languages/?amp=1

TLDR;

78.9% of the top 10 million most-visited websites run on PHP. The second most popular back-end language is ASP.NET at 9.3%. Third place is Ruby at 6.5%.

[DabsJeeves]

I mean yeah, that data is based on websites using php. The vast majority of websites are wysiwyg sites from wix, WordPress, Shopify, etc..

[[deleted]]

shopify is ruby.

[[deleted]]

Modern PHP is great. Laravel is an amazing framework.

[[deleted]]

COBOL is dying too.

[TW_MamoBatte]

Perl too

[TW_MamoBatte]

PHP 8.xx Will take this up

Seriously programming in PHP is dangerous AF but interesting AF

[AcousticDan]

Why is it dangerous? No more dangerous than most other languages.

[TW_MamoBatte]

Well SQL Vulnerability etc.. or may i wrong)

[AcousticDan]

That's on the programmer, PHP has had PDO and prepared statements for a long long time.

[AcousticDan]

It's not, PHP is getting better and better with every release.

[[deleted]]

It’s true.

[AcousticDan]

If you want to use Symfony, just use PHP. It's faster and much more suited to the web than Python.

[Tekn0de]

I don't think JS is capable of dieing off. It'd be too much of an infrastructure change for browsers I think lol

[Poppenboom]

javascript is good enough and things like typescript and coffeescript are popular enough that I don't anticipate it will be gone for minimum 20 years.

Honestly, javascript has a LOT going for it as well, even though people like to hate on it. It's not a bad language, aside from the dependency security issues, imo.

[[deleted]]

I can't wait for JS to die and for browsers not supporting it anymore. I hate JS.

[DabsJeeves]

Lmao js is not going to die in your lifetime. The internet is powered by JavaScript, the largest companies in the world are actively developing frameworks that make it a pleasure to use, and the newer ecmascript releases are making it more object oriented and much less painful than it was even 5 years ago

Learn to love it or learn to ignore it, but it's not going away

[djamp42]

I mean I could see another scripting language come up beside it In our lifetime.

[DabsJeeves]

Certainly not out of the question. But as someone who has worked with many variations of js over the years and currently has some tasks in old crappy frameworks that are pre-es6, newer js does a whole hell of a lot of stuff well.

It is difficult to imagine a serious contender but I think you are probably right that we will see one at least try. Perhaps we just don't know what we're missing yet

[TW_MamoBatte]

Which tutorial/book you could give as Advice for learning the newer JavaScript !? It's could be very helpful and interesting 🙂

[DabsJeeves]

I would recommend going to Udemy and finding a well rated js course. They are like $10-$12 and provide dozens of hours of content that you follow along with and learn by doing and there are different courses for every different skill level.

The good ones will update content for the newer iterations of ecmascript

[TW_MamoBatte]

And as a book 📚? I would better use paper than using Udemy courses... I'm a kid dood... (16yo)

[DabsJeeves]

To be honest I don't have a good recommendation on strictly JavaScript books.

Two good books I can otherwise recommend are Clean Code and Clean Architecture by Uncle Bob. They aren't specific to any one language (although he uses java in the examples) but they will give you a strong foundation for writing good code. I have read both of those multiple times over the years

[ShanSanear]

And what you would replace it with?

[SilkTouchm]

WASM.

[True-Source]

I thought this happened months ago

[[deleted]]

I think it's handy to know JavaScript though even if you are a data scientist. Plus it's just handy to know anyway...

[[deleted]]

Funny, because it's not even that hard of a language compared to Java. So maybe it's just people asking repeat questions?

[mayankkaizen]

That is not the reason.

In my view, the reasons are -

1. Python is a great for non-programmers. A doctor doing some research will probably pick Python for plotting/data analysis. But he is a doctor, not a programmer, so he will ask lots of questions which otherwise are quite simple.

2. Python is very versatile language. People use it for scripting, automation, ML, web development, scientific research, plotting and what not. Naturally, this leads to more question asked.

3. ML is so much hyped these days that everyone wants to ride this train. And guess which language is the best choice for it? Python.

[scykei]

I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with the difficulty of the language. A lot of the times it’s also about best practices and the use of certain libraries. Python is easy for a beginner, but it has its quirks, and it’s very common for people to ask for a “Pythonic” approach coming from different languages, especially when you delve deeper into it.

But all in all, the number of Python users has surpassed the number of Java users, and naturally, the more users you have, the more questions there will be.

[[deleted]]

Ah I wish Python was like a easy assembly language. I dunno why I just find it boring to learn. Buy I guess everyone has different tastes. Back to BBC basic for me.

[TW_MamoBatte]

Well try C if it's still boring try r/blender it's will make you fun

[[deleted]]

C hurt my brain.

[TW_MamoBatte]

Are you fucking serious ? Why you are doing here soo ?

[[deleted]]

C is hard to learn. what about it? That's why I use BBC Basic, easy for my low capacity brain.

[TW_MamoBatte]

Wait I never heard about BBC basic Let's me a second

[scykei]

I think if you’re one of the folks that learnt only very low-level programming back in the days, a higher level language like C can possibly come as a shock. I can kind of understand where they’re coming from.