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Comment by Ensorceled | Hacker News Reader

Sure! I dislike all sorts of languages and environments.

That wasn't my point. My point is if you had to write Fortran IV using an IBM 32xx terminal you wouldn't be quite so hyperbolic about modern Python.

Unless you are claiming you would rather return to writing Fortran IV than use Python because you like Fortran IV better, in which case I'm very confused.

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Just because languages were more of a PITA in the past, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pick out faults of current languages and search for new/better solutions...

What does all this have to do with Fortran, terminals, or weaving your own core memory?

Python's competitors are Lisp, OCaml, Swift, C# etc.

I prefer at least Lisp and OCaml.

Python's actual competitors are Ruby, Perl, R, Shell, Visual Basic, Javascript, PHP, and Matlab.

Nobody's going to bother out OCaml or Lisp for web development, data science, or OS scripting where Python is most often used.

Well, Facebook is trying to make OCaml happen for web development (ReasonML). Not sure if they're succeeding, though.

Clojure has got pretty nice tools for web development (both backend and — with Clojurescript — frontend). It’s definitely out there in some places.

Python and Lisps do directly compete as the preferred introductory language for university computer science classes.

In this decade?

Not even MIT teaches lisp anymore.

>Not even MIT teaches lisp anymore.

That's their loss.

Yep. https://github.com/racket/racket/wiki/Courses-using-Racket

Lots of universities teach Scheme, particularly Racket. Although Python is more popular, even in that domain.

Well, the original context here was about comparing python to fortran, which also doesn't fit this "competitor" criteria. It's an apples to oranges comparison, sure, but that's the way this whole discussion started. At least Lisp is roughly the same age as fortran, which gets at the root assumption that python is an improvement over older languages.

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