Back when I decided it was time to add a scripting language, Perl and Python seemed like the obvious choices, and in my mind were equally good options. I asked my best friend which I should choose, and he more or less said, "You can't go wrong with either one, but when you ask for help Perl people are assholes and Python people are nice."
I can't confirm his thoughts on Perl and I haven't interacted much with Ruby, but the Python community is definitely welcoming and patient in my experience. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a significant factor in Python's prevalence over Perl, Ruby, or anything else.
yep the Perl community kind of had issues around the turn of the millennium and the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end.
I don't think there was any toxicity in the Ruby community but it was made up of working programmers where as the big leading voices in the python community was teaching assistants and students so it might have been more tailored to newbies.
I don't recall there being much real industrial use of python prior to Ruby emerging even if python is technically older so i think the real answer lies in why the educational sector decided that teaching python was easier and significant whitespace plays a huge part here.
> I don't recall there being much real industrial use of python prior to Ruby emerging even if python is technically older
Yeah that's my recollection too. About 2011ish there weren't a lot of jobs in python yet. Perhaps in SV, but not out in the real world. Several startups were doing it, including Youtube and google at the time.
But in the F500 world, python wasn't used at all. I started using it in 2008/9-ish.
Yeah, python 2->3 transition was painful. But, I would argue that was self inflicted. Guido and company chose not to develop a 2.8/2.9/etc series where people could move their code base over incrementally.
I mean, I love python, but that sucked!
Yes it would have been more work for the devs, but the amount of work it meant for the users were worse.
In fact they pretty much just threw away anything before python 3.6 anyway now. Many things introduced in the 3.x series before 3.6 just don't work anymore (asyncio syntax being the notable one).
> Guido and company chose not to develop a 2.8/2.9/etc series where people could move their code base over incrementally.
That is literally what 2.7 was, as well as reimplementing some features in later p3 (up to 3.4).
The core team definitely had the wrong transition model at the start, and it took some time for the community to convince them then decide on which items were the most important, but let’s not act like they did not get it in the end.
> In fact they pretty much just threw away anything before python 3.6 anyway now. Many things introduced in the 3.x series before 3.6 just don't work anymore (asyncio syntax being the notable one).
The core team initially saw the transition as “run 2to3, fix what’s left, publish updates, P2 is gone”, but aside from 2to3 being quite limited such transition is quite hard for dependencies, as it means they leave all older dependents behind entirely (dependents which might be the primary user for e.g. company-sponsored projects), or they have to keep two different codebases in sync (which is hard), plus the limitations of pypi in terms of versions segregation.
What ended up happening instead was libraries would update to 2.7 then to cross-version codebases, this way their downstream could migrate at their leisure, a few years down the line people started dropping P2.
> Are there any languages with major breaking changes that have done the upgrade smoothly?
Some but usually statically typed languages e.g. elm’s upgrade tool worked pretty well as long as you didn’t have native modules and all your dependencies had been ported. I think the swift migrator ended up working pretty well after a while (Swift broke compatibility a lot “initially”) though I’ve less experience with that.
An alternative, again for statically typed languages more than dynamically typed ones, is to allow majorly different versions of the language to cohabit e.g. editions in Rust (Rust shares the stdlib between all editions but technically you could version the stdlib too).
Not workable for Python, not just because it doesn’t really have the tooling (it has some with the __future__ imports but nowhere near enough) but also because it changed runtime data model components specifically the entire string data model, which is not a small matter (and was by far the most difficult part of the transition, and why they piled on smaller breakages while at it really).
The only ruby person i've met was insistent that ruby was the one true way and he trued to force it into everything. That attitude turned me off.
Of course I already knew Python, and so did the rest of my team so we had been doing tools in Python (the guy wasn't on my team), but until he pushed ruby into places where python would have been better (import a Python library rather than shell to out to a program) I was willing to accept it was probably fine '
> The only ruby person I've met was insistent that ruby was the one true way and he trued to force it into everything. That attitude turned me off.
I mean, if you read almost any Elixir article that has hit the front page of HN, there are always comments from Pythonistas saying, "Why bother when there's Python?" Similar attitude. Obviously it's not everyone, but it's not everyone in the Ruby community either.
It’s such a bizarre reason. “One person using something rubbed me the wrong way so I decided not to use it”. Did the person extrapolate to an entire community from a sample size of 1?
The only ruby person i've met was insistent that ruby was the one true way
That sucks. I've been doing Ruby full-time since 2014 at 4 companies and I've never seen that sentiment, even from people who really love it. My experiences have been really positive.
My experience with python was simply, people wanting to get shit done. This was circa 2008. They weren't really engaging in language wars, but doing innovative things like extending Java, with Jython.
I was arguing for the F500 company I was working on to explore using Jython to write unit tests for Java code.
Why not have a scripting language to write unit tests for Java code?
I see this with Rust trying to extend python in interesting ways. I don't see this with Java trying to extend C/C++ or Python.
Python and Ruby have some things where the intuitions are exactly inverted from one another. It took me a long time to figure out why Python rubbed me the wrong, and that if I dig up how I used to structure code in Pascal, it’s fine.
Not that I care much these days since I prefer writing in Elixir.
I can't imagine Python's welcoming community has anything to do with it. If anything it was Ruby that had a reputation for being the most welcoming community with its MINASWAN (cringe) philosophy.
> I can't imagine Python's welcoming community has anything to do with it. If anything it was Ruby that had a reputation for being the most welcoming community with its MINASWAN (cringe) philosophy.
TBH, community had nothing to do with Python's enormous success over its competitors (Perl, and Ruby. Possibly Tcl too.).
Nor did any technical merit, nor ergonomics.
There's one, and only one, reason why Python exploded at the expense of the other competitors: The ease and acceptance of using the language as glue for C functions.
Python's popularity is built on a solid foundation compatibility with C.
If, in the 90s, C++ had taken off enough to displace C, I doubt Python would be as popular as it is. Python owes its ubiquity to C, because if C was not ubiquitous, Python wouldn't be either.
(It's only recently, like the last 10 year or so, that I started seeing popular Python programs which didn't have a dependency on C libraries. And even now, it's still rare to see).
My experience of trying to get my own C functions to use in Python to have been nightmarish. Yes, you can do it... if you have exactly the same compiler & version used to produce the python interpreter itself.
C's only usefulness to Python is: it allows optimization of the 80/20 or 90/10 rule, so performance doesn't have to totally suck with Python.
Python 'won' IMHO because it hit a sweet spot -- simple enough for beginners, in fact, beginner-friendly, but due to having a good basic set of datatypes (lists, tuples, sets, plus the usual ints, floats, and complex) -- this allowed complex ideas to be compactly expressed. The ability to switch between functional and imperative styles also helped.
Python is a 'good enough' lisp. MIT switched, and Norvig has said as much.
No, the astonishing thing is that Python survived the 2->3 transition, and came out stronger on the other end. Language cleanups, new 'syntactic sugar' (e.g. @ as the decorator syntax), and what you see is Python is trying to actively steal all the successful programming paradigms under one unified syntax.
Is python perfect? Hardly. But it's beginner-friendly and expert-optimized. AND, unlike C++ (at least for me), you can get ALL of Python into your head at the same time. (Libraries, ok, but true in any language). In this specific sense, it is exactly like C (you can keep it all in your head, even the edge cases).
There are newer languages gunning for a piece of Python's mindshare (Zig, Nim). But because Python is a moving target: getting better and better, the others will need to provide a spectacular use-case advantage --- and I just don't see that happening.
Maz (ruby author) is nice and so we are nice, isn’t so bad. It’s twee sounding but saying you are going to follow the example set by the founder is absolutely fine. Is it any worse than the Python ‘benevolent dictator for life’ example?
I'm genuinely curious: what's "cringe" about MINASWAN?
(I write mostly Python these days, but have been involved in both communities for a long time, and MINASWAN never particularly stood out to me other than as a cute reminder to be nice.)
It was meant tongue in cheek as I was defending Ruby being the most welcoming community. It's just a bit twee like the voice-over on London Underground - "See it, say it, sorted".
I can't confirm his thoughts on Perl and I haven't interacted much with Ruby, but the Python community is definitely welcoming and patient in my experience. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a significant factor in Python's prevalence over Perl, Ruby, or anything else.