Ask HN: What would've been Python if Python didn't exist?

8 points·KhoomeiK··14 comments

What language do you think would've taken the place of Python as the predominant language for ML and data manipulation if Python was never invented? Would languages that aim to be "Python except better" like Julia still exist? Would the "AI revolution" have even occurred?

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Lua, Ruby and Javascript all exist relatively independently of Python and have quite similar features sets.

I wonder if numpy being fairly usable in 2005 is the bigger factor than Python itself.

I was about to write this (except I think Ruby was influenced by Python). Then I deleted it, because I'm not sure what the point of the question is.

Hm, yeah it would be interesting to see how optimized Node.js would've gotten if it were a necessity for ML to progress.

I'd honestly hope that it would have been something like Common Lisp or Ocaml... now I just hope that Julia replaces Python for ML.

Initially, probably perl.

Yeah, I've definitely heard people say that Perl was effectively Python before Python. I'm not sure if it could scale in terms of computational ability for ML though.

Python doesn't really scale -- it just calls out to C code for heavy computation and perl could do that too.

The more difficult part would be making perl easily maintainable. You can write unmaintainable code in any language, but perl made it easier, and python makes it (relatively) harder.

Ruby probably would've evolved from Perl. PHP probably would've been refined faster.

R - it's already good just not quite as good as Python.

How about GNU Octave?

As a programming language for ML? God no.

Perl, Ruby, PHP

Perl

ruby

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