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Comment by aabajian | Hacker News Reader

Python is the language that, once you know it, you'll never go back. It's gotten to the point where I use it to run an entire backend as well as simple terminal scripts. It's faster to write a Python script to "switch the first and third columns in a file", rather than Googling for an appropriate awk command (or spending the time to come up with one myself).

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Funny. I know it, and still hate it. For every opinion that is held universally true, there is at least one person (but far more likely, many people) for whom that opinion is demonstrably false.

I've been primarily a C# programmer for the majority of my career, with probably equal parts dabbling in Ruby, PHP, Javascript, Sql (large sprawling analytics framework sql), and a bit of R.

When I switched to Ruby dev-work though, my tools changed. I found myself writing a lot more scripts for things which I previously would have made a C# console app for, mostly because osx/linux make it a lot easier. Soon I started writing a little Python, and found I was just plain productive (things that might have taken me many hours would take minutes), and now it's becoming a primary language for me. I'm not sure I'd use it for the majority of my work, but it's probably my #2 language tool.

Python is a great language, but just not one that suits my mode of thinking. I learned Perl first, spent my time in college learning Python, C, Javascript, and FORTRAN 90 (at least the code that had been updated from F77), and eventually went back to Perl as I liked it the best.

I could make a snarky comment about "you'll never go back" being correct, but I do make the occasional commit to a Python project. But honestly I'd rather deal with well-written PHP than well-written Python despite the fact that the Python language is -1 times better than PHP. Just the way my mind works.

I know python fairly well, and had previously done most web development with flask or django. I had to learn JS so that I could do front end web dev, things like D3 and such for visualizations of data. I tried out a few of the frameworks that I came across for back-end web dev as well, things like Koa, knex, passport, etc - and I have to say that these days I start far more projects as JS/Node.JS projects than I do python.

I still love and use python quite often, but more in data analysis/manipulation projects with Jupyter - Node definitely doesn't have anything on python in that dept.

p.s., check out pandas if you're not already familiar with it.

had to learn JS so that I could do front end web dev, things like D3 and such for visualizations of data

If you need to visualize from Python without touching JS try http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/

While I agree with the sentiment, I do still love the concise format of awk commands. Although arguably, they can get rather confusing when trying to do complex stuff.

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