All languages have life cycles. Hell, some even go dormant and become popular — or unexpectedly critical – again.
What would qualities would a language need to have to eventually threaten Python's dominance? My fear is any innovative ideas will just get absorbed. Yes, I realize much of #Python's muscle is marketing by big industry players.
#programming #perl #python #raku #forth #assembly #cplusplus #cpp #js #fortran #cobol #BASIC #nimlang #golang
@profoundlynerdy I see it differently... I see Python's muscle as the result of a happy accident that the scientific computing community created NumPy (Numeric back then) and SciPy, a cool ecosystem of libraries grew, and when the ML hype came that infrastructure was there. Also, the community around a language sometimes matters more than the language specs. But, nowadays, the language has been much influenced by the big players, no doubt.
@profoundlynerdy That's really interesting to hear. I perceive python's popularity as coming from diametrically opposing sources - grassroots enthusiasm from a wide variety of geeks who found it to be useful. In my mind , the PyCon conference exemplified this: scrappy, inclusive, full of passionate nerds, run at cost by enthusiastic volunteers. Compared to previous establishment like Java or C++ conferences, which were very expensive corporate sales affairs.
@profoundlynerdy
" I realize much of #Python's muscle is marketing by big industry players."
That is actually funny to read.
Python has gone the first 25 years of its life with no "big industry player" - and today, if any, the players advocating for Python are big DatA/ML platforms like databricks and snowflakes.
Python's major strength however rely on its conciseness, consistence and expressiveness - which has grown organically as a community driven project since forever.
@gwidion @profoundlynerdy a big part of that trajectory has been to become the second best at everything. That's the clincher.
@gwidion us I’ve used python since the ‘90’s . And immediately appreciated its design, and understood its place in the ecosystem.
@philbetts @profoundlynerdy
up to the point is the second best for everything and best one for a lot of other things.
But some people are simply afraid of "no braces", while others, IDK, I think they are just afraid of learning something that hasn't inherited all of its syntax from C, so, they prefer to buy in to the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
@profoundlynerdy I agree with you @tartley with maybe one exception, the 500 PEPs about typing are caused by big corps using Python, unfortunately.
@villares @profoundlynerdy ah, right, because the fiddly details of typing become important on very large codebases. Fair enough, thanks!
@profoundlynerdy #julialang is a cool one that could dethrone Python for some applications. But computing is huge, Python barely touched mobile or frontend... #wasm now lets it make some inroads... The dominant language I personally avoid is another one: JS.
But that ecosystem of libraries and bindings was not a coincidence. It was already relatively broad in the late 90s. Being explicitly of the world rather than its own world was a conscious choice: Python's predecessor ABC was its own world, and Java, being born at the time, also leaned that way.
