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Comment by windlep | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Python is dying, that's why it just moved up in the Tiobe rankings to #5, displacing PHP (which obviously no one ever uses): http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

It's dominance of science is why Python has 25% science talks this year at PyCon, and why we see articles like: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3012442/application-develop...

But yes, if you didn't know any languages, then of course you should invest in an immature language with no mature libraries for the tasks you need to complete, because you were given a few months of extra runway time by your boss to fill-in the library ecosystem instead of getting your job done. We'll ignore that PyPy places you damn close to Go in terms of performance (except with mature proven libs), and that usually your task won't be CPU-bound anyways (the GIL release on I/O tasks)....

Why do troll questions like this even hit the front page of HN?

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I don't see a need for the snark. I don't see this as a troll question at all. Python is obviously thriving for scientific programming but it's not hard to tell that the question being asked is about whether Python is losing popularity as a general purpose web programming language.

If someone wanted to get into building web apps would Python be a good choice?

The answer is likely to be colored by your experience. I'd say yes, it is losing ground to other languages in the context of programming for the web. The people who use it know why they're using it. Othetwise you don't see many coding boot camps teaching Python. It's all about Ruby and Node.

But is Python dying? Not by a long shot. It's just getting less attention right now because of some of the other new toys that are making a lot of noise right now.

Amongst what bubble of people you're entangled with?

I consider this a troll question because frequently I see HN questions like this completely disconnected from programming communities at large (which do not participate in HN), extrapolated to the wider web of all programmers. By this factor alone I'd expect Java to be completely obsolete by now.... but obviously no one is oblivious enough to reality to suggest that.

As for that question, if you want to build webapps right now, then yes, Python, as well as Ruby, and PHP, would be absolutely fantastic choices. The library ecosystems for all three of these are incredibly rich, mature, and well supported. Choose the language of these 3 that appeals to you the most, you will not be disappointed. I'm not going to tell you which one to choose, I think you'll be happy with whichever of these 3 languages appeals to you the most.

If you don't mind filling in the occasional gap, and like the bleeding edge of newness, try Rust, or Go. I've done both, they're fun languages with interesting paradigms (built-in lightweight threads vs. memory-safety at all costs FIGHT!).

Getting less attention? According to what? Did you see the the link about dominating science? Attention according to what group of people?

Python is dying the same way Apple is dying. Only to people addicted to the new and the exciting.

The snag with that is that once I really digged into them, I found Python (and Ruby) just as exciting as the new stuff (Go, JS on Node). So back I went. Same experience with Apple.

You raise very good points... But the question didn't seem "trolly" to me.

> displacing PHP (which obviously no one ever uses

21% of the Internet uses Wordpress, which is built with PHP.

Yes, that was a bit of snark, sorry. Was hoping that would emphasize how huge of news it is that Python moved past PHP even on such an arbitrary language benchmark.

In this case (Wordpress), PHP is used by end users, not by programmers.

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