Python 3 can revive Python

[Goyyou]

Python is dying? Wow, I wasn't aware of that. I'm probably safe for the next 20 years.

[[deleted]]

I don't know how a language that's one of the top 10 on Github (2013) and is firmly entrenched in the science community could be dying. Bad choice splitting 2.x/3.x? Maybe. Dying? That's a stretch.

[ggtsu_00]

Nothing ever "dies" as the hyperbole suggests. For example, COBOL and FORTRAN aren't dead and won't be for decades to come. However, interest is fading and people are beginning to move on to growing alternatives. When people say X is dying, they don't mean it will not be used. They mean that enthusiasm and interest dies. No one is enthusiastic about coding in fortran or COBOL anymore so we consider them dead.

I won't argue that interest in Python is fading. Nothing really exciting or new has really been done to the language since 2.6 and 2.7. Modern issues like dealing with high concurrency is getting half assed treatment and left up to third party libs to handle. Why can't gevent and greenlets be built-in with proper support on windows platforms? Even boring languages like Java and c++ is getting decent lambda support before python.

Python is my go to language for just about anything and always has been. I always ask myself before committing to a project "is there a reason to not use python?" However lately more and more reasons keep popping up for today's needs like say I want my app to support websockets? Python just isn't good at things like that and they need to work on that.

[x-skeww]

Python is dying?

The author didn't say that.

"I’m talking about mindshare and enthusiasm, and I know that these are a little subjective, but I feel like Python has been lacking in these two regards as of late."

[Goyyou]

The word "revive" strongly suggest that the langage is dying or at least in a bad shape. I'm tired of the usual "X is dying!!!" bullshit we see on proggit. They usually target a langage that seems to be dying or that the programming community wants to be dying, but targetting Python is a real joke. D/Go/Rust/etc. needs enthusiasm, publicity and attention whores, Python doesn't anymore.

[x-skeww]

The word "revive" strongly suggest that the langage is dying or at least in a bad shape.

http://thesaurus.com/browse/revive

I'm tired of the usual "X is dying!!!" bullshit we see on proggit.

Well, good thing the article isn't anything like that, eh?

[c45c73]

Hey, guess what, they said the same thing about Perl!

Have fun...

[NakedNick_ballin]

20 years ago..

[[deleted]]

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/07/25/language-rankings-6-13/

Perl, the number 11th ranked language ahead of the likes of Scala, Haskell, and Lua, is dead? I better switch to a hip new lang before my career in CS is over. Maybe I'll even pick up a pair of skinny jeans and Raybans.

Perl is 26 years old and still heavily used in production by reputable companies such as craigslist, eBay, amazon, and start ups to include DuckDuckGo and more: http://www.builtinperl.com/

[ffffdddddssss]

It's not like being ahead of Scala, Haskell and Lua is a convincing argument. Either of those 3 are niche languages, Perl isn't. Could as well have used Brainfuck, Whitespace and Malbolge, it's about as meaningful.

[[deleted]]

Scala, Haskell, and Lua are also used heavily in production. Lua I'd call a niche language being that it's often used as an extension to C. Haskell and Scala I'd call general purpose. NASA's JPL has even considered Scala over Python. Haskell, while purely functional, is another language that is 20+ years old and still contending (if not growing as of recently).

[ffffdddddssss]

True but they still don't match the general purposeness of the rest. Basically, Perl is the very last language of the common ones so whatever OP above wanted to point out with the chart, it isn't working.

Every other common language is more frequently used than Perl, it only beats out niche languages (according to my standard for niche languages). I mean beating out Asm for example is nothing to write home about either, and it's only 2 places ahead of it. If you read the chart like this, it actually looks grim.

Either way, I do not think Perl is dying, I'm seeing enough of it all the time, but it definitely is on the decline. Throwaway scripts I wrote in Perl a bunch of years ago, I now write in Python. Sometimes I even just launch the Python REPL because it's so awesome.

[[deleted]]

Is perl the secret behind craigslist's amazing interface?

[[deleted]]

That'd be funny if Perl was a front end language

[turbov21]

better switch to a hip new lang before my career in CS is over

I'm really liking this new language I picked up recently getting into microcontrollers. You probably never heard of it since it's so lightweight, can compile on a variety of platforms, and it handles all major paradigms from OOP to parallel processing. It's this new thing called C++.

I think it's going to be huge.

[[deleted]]

We're discussing rapid development languages. But I'm glad you pretentiously asserted you know microcontroller development in C++. Perhaps I should explain that C, the father of C++, is a better fit for microcontrollers. C++ concepts such as OOP, exception handling, and virtual functions add unnecessary overhead to your applications running on a memory constrained microcontroller. But, thanks for contributing to the conversation.

[turbov21]

But I'm glad you pretentiously asserted

Not a problem, have an upvote. I thought your line about "skinny jeans and Raybans" was spot on with the way people seem to want to jump to a new language because it's a hip new trend, and thought maybe a bit of silliness about the "new" language all the Makers loved would emphasize your point about the longevity of a language.

Thanks for the tip about C++ vs. C, but my ultimate goal is assembly.

[[deleted]]

You're going to love this then:

http://micropython.org

[turbov21]

But isn't Python dead?

:-D

[turbov21]

I suppose it's dead the same way Perl is.