
The Incredible Growth of Python Language - joaoperibeiro
http://stacktrender.com/post/st/the-incredible-growth-of-python-stack-overflow-blog
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Nicksil
Discussion from a few days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15186025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15186025)

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colmvp
I think there are network effects.

Years ago, I was mostly interesting in Ruby/Rails because my friends in SF
were interested in it and so I wanted to learn from them. There were also a
ton of articles on HN that popped up.

But as soon as I became interested in Data Science/ML, I wanted to immerse
myself in as many tutorials/projects as possible. As it so happens, a lot of
books/tutorials I've read are in Python, so I figured why not. I really
appreciate the simplicity of the language and the fact that so many
interesting libraries are available.

I find it quite a beautiful language to try to learn.

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nwenzel
IMO python and its popularity is somewhat split between a scripting language,
maybe a R alternative, with a data science focus on one hand. On the other
hand is python as a web dev language with Django and flask as the popular
frameworks.

We're looking to hire on the web Dev side [0]. We do get a number of people
who have more of a scripting focus, but limited web Dev experience. I think
some of that comes because of the online MOOC phenomenon and the proliferation
of python courses that are really python scripting (not python web dev)
courses.

I'm curious what the HN community thinks of my hypothesis of that split and if
the "incredible growth" is one-sided as a scripting language.

[0]
[https://www.simplelegal.com/careers?gh_jid=678936](https://www.simplelegal.com/careers?gh_jid=678936)

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lanuk
Why not link to the original article?

[https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/06/incredible-growth-
pyth...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/06/incredible-growth-python)

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joaoperibeiro
No special reason. I found it on this aggregator and though about sharing it.

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Iv
It is not just because it attracts beginners, it is also because it is a good
tool for a lot of tasks where you can trade some performances for ease of use.

I think a lot of the recent growth is due to theano/keras, the most popular
deep learning platform out there. It also attracts more and more data
scientists, now that distributions like Anaconda make it 'easy' to install on
windows.

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user5994461
Also, everything had to be redocumented and reanswered for python 3. I
wouldn't be surprised if people had to look up their issue repeatedly on stack
overflow until they finally find help.

Every top answer in python seems to be dating back to 2009 (python 2.1), quite
a few are completely broken code nowadays (blame the breaking change in the
standard API).

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fzzzy
Python 2.1 was from 2001 -- did you mean 2.6.1?

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user5994461
I see answers as far as python 2.1. Assume the linux distributions and the
business users were always a few years behind the trunk.

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Abishek_Muthian
It would be interesting to collect data to see how many continued using python
from prototype to production. Python would definetly help to build MVP, when
in production where actual concurrency matters; very few like Instagram have
built robust python based architectures.

Btw, achieving decent concurrency in python is quite straightforward.
Understanding of Greenlets, Gevent, uvloop Cython etc. could prevent headache
in future.

