Python is now Blub! Run! | Hacker News Reader

Python is now Blub! Run!

arvindn.livejournal.com

23 pointsprakash47 comments

Oh no, the [programming language I favour | band I like] is now mainstream. Well, I [use the more obscure features | prefer their older albums].

I [am a much better coder | have way better taste] than those other people anyways.

I liked [band I like | programming language I favor | dinosaurs] when they were still underground.

http://xkcd.com/460/

False premise. Google chose Python as the first language for GAE because it would be the most appealing language among the programming languages already used at Google. It has nothing to do with "being a language widely used and understood by the masses".

Javascript/Rhino would be also a cool choice, but I think that is what Steve Yegge is working on.

"Because if you want to do a startup, you should have some reason to believe that you are several times more productive than the average programmer, an order of magnitude even."

Uhh... what? Who said that?

I would hope my organization was several times more productive per employee of an average company. I wouldn't put all my faith in it being the direct result of a specific programming language.

That sounds to me like a (poor) paraphrase of part of the Blub essay (http://paulgraham.com/avg.html).

There's a lot more to programmer productivity than language. There are a lot of organizational factors.

The programmer's aptitude is probably the biggest factor, and in the case of the most talented coders, probably swamps the choice of language by a large factor.

Being several times more productive is not going to benefit you so much if you are working on the wrong things.

Also, there is a lot of really bad code and really bad practices out there in different niches. There are still plenty of places where you can bring in test driven development and a language like Python and kick ass. In fact, I bet some of those niches will even have competitors who are backwards Python coders ripe for takedown.

Even worse, he's writing blog posts in English! (the same language used by millions of semi-literate people)

"millions." "semi-literate." haha...you made my day.

There are more people learning English in china than we have English speakers here in the US.

Maybe thats why, haha.

now. now.

Sorry, accidentally down voted. Slippy fingers clicked to fast.

sorry, accidentally up voted.

someone downvoted my accidental upvote :)

wow.

there goes a loser.

loser

What about Bluby..err Ruby? :D

well, if i look on the situation more seriously, python is more popular than ruby, and ruby has some features that make it a tiny bit more powerful in some situations so if the author if such an underground freak, he can use ruby for a few months until it becomes Bluby too.

Python more popular than Ruby? To me it always seemed that Ruby and Rails are more popular.

I would say that RoR is more popular than, say, Django, but that Python the language is more popular than Ruby the language.

Yeah, thats what i meant. Do you use ruby for scripting blender or anything else other that RoR? Do you use it for scientific computation? Do people use it for shell scripts and small games, or GUI apps?You can do that with ruby, but for me, people learn ruby because rails is popular, python doesn't have that one big killer app, people learn python because its generally fun and useful for many stuff.

I think this is a great indicator of whether a language is a success: Do people learn it because its generally fun and useful? (Versus, do people learn it because of corporate PR, or because it's the accepted/official way to do [X])

If it were true, Guido at least would be happy (how much more "blub" can you get than "programming for everyone"?)

Unfortunately, it isn't true at all. As it stands, no one but hardcore web app enthousiasts use Google Apps. That hardly makes it mainstream, I should think.

Is OOP a Blub-level paradigm now? I suspect that it has been for awhile now.

You can't say that a language is Blub. It becomes Blub only if the programmer using the language fails to realize that there are more powerful languages. It has nothing to do with mainstream or not.

Every language is Blub to someone. What do Haskell types think about Lisp?

Common Lisp is ugly to look at. (Compared to Haskell or Scheme.)

I didn't understand if the article is ironic or not.

could lisp be blub for something else? if yes, what is that something. if you think not, why not?

I think (today's) Lisp could be blub, but only if Lisps were to become the standard category of programming languages. Then some other more advanced meta-lisp that is a few layers of abstraction up, and applying some yet-undiscovered principles of computer science in its high-level semantics would be at the cutting edge, and the vanilla lisps would be mundane and practical-seeming.

For some some Lisp-developers Lisp is blub relative to Haskell.

how come? could you give an example?

I've met Lisp-programmers which simple didn't understand the point of Haskell - all those arbitrary constraints (no IO, no mutation) which just required elaborate workaround (monads) to get back to square one. This makes Lisp "blub" (for them).

X is blub if there is a language which is more powerful than X and you can't understand that the "extra stuff" in that language is actually power, as opposed to meaningless stuff.

For example, an argument could be made that Lisp is a blub, because of the libraries problem. I'm not a lisp user myself, though I'm learning Scheme, so I don't know for sure if the libraries problem is an actual problem. But if it is, you could say that Lisp is a blub for Python, because while Lisp users are spending their time inventing a DSL that's incompatible with everything else, Python users type 'import awesomelibrary' and get the job done.

So, really, it depends on your notion of power. In pg's original Blub essay, power is Lisp-y-ness (or macros, perhaps), so by definition Lisp can't be a blub. But if your notion of power is something else, maybe it can be.

Specifically, the Blub idea applies to language power. You could build python's libraries in Lisp, but you can't build a macro in Python without changing the language.

On the other hand, Lisp isn't at the top of the theoretical Blub hierarchy. Users of erlang can to some degree look at lisp as a Blub - what do you mean there's no lightweight concurrency, and you can't start millions of threads and have the messaging just managed? Lisp is broken! A language with Lisp's (lack of) syntax and erlang's concurrency might be able to look down on both.

"You could build python's libraries in Lisp"

Then why doesn't someone do so?

Just because one could do something, doesn't mean one will do something. I'm not arguing you should use Lisp over Python, merely that the strength of libraries is not a language feature per se. Clearly, it's one of the most important things to consider when picking a language, but it's not a feature of that language any more than how helpful the people in that language's IRC chat room is, or how good the documentation.

Have you ever been to common-lisp.net? It's no CPAN, but same idea. In practice you've got everything you need to work with, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Wait a minute. How did he come to this realisation? Did he just suddenly INVENT it? Did he just MAKE UP that graph? Because to me, it sure seems that way. He does not backup his assertion that python is now in the middle of the programmer world.

"This doesn't mean that I'm going to start programming exclusively in Lisp from now on—the libraries just aren't there."

What libraries does he need that "just aren't there"?

Python became blub the second the "one true way to do it" mantra was conceived.

Blubbiness is not a property of the language per se. Is it the phenomenon that you don't recognize if an unfamiliar language is more powerful than the currently most powerful language you know. The more powerful languages just seem bizarre are annoying. But you immediately recognize when a language is less powerful than one you know.

Therefore many developers think they are using the most powerful language in the world ("Blub").

So if Python is the most powerful language you know and you don't understand the power of eg. Lisp macros or the Haskell type system, then Python is Blub for you.

If Lisp is you favorite language and you don't understand the power of the Python readability, the concept of "one obvious way" and so on, then Lisp is Blub for you.

the assumption is that languages vary in power, and furthermore that lisp sits pretty high on this power ladder. let us assume further that lisp is more powerful than python (i think that's safe. in this forum anyways). so to say that python readability makes lisp blub sort of implies python is blub to you. unless, of course, you think python is more powerful than lisp.

my question is, what leads people to believe lisp is so high up on the language power scale?

ps: incidentally, macros are all about readability. if you took all the macros out of your program and substituted them by their macro expansion (by copying and pasting) you would end up with exactly the same program. exactly. it would just be less readable ;)

Yes, but good coding and powerful languages are all about readability. You could write everything in assembly, after all.

You would get the same phenotype. But far from the same genotype.

So measured by what the programs do - they are the same. Measured by how well you can evolve the program, the not-expanded version will probably fare better.

you and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stcredzero are getting off on a tangent. the original post was: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=279062.

I assumed the definition of blub from the original PG essay, which argues that Lisp is near or at the top of the power scale.

I don't really believe in a linear power scale though. Some languages are strictly more powerful than others, but there are also (i believe) different axes of power. I mention Haskell, Lisp and Python because they are three very powerful languages, but powerful in different ways. If you think that any one of them are strictly more powerful than the others, then its probably because you don't understand the power of the other.

i don't know what you mean. could you provide an example? let's take lisp and python. in which "axis" is python more powerful and how? (i'm talking about core language features).

The power of Python is a consequence of a design with focus on clarity, readability and consistency. GvR understands that code is as much communication to humans as instructions to the computer, and that code is read much more than written. This makes the language very productive, but is especially valuable when you have to read or maintain code written by others. It is easier to learn from each others code and libraries.

Related languages like Perl or Lisp with a focus on TMTOWTDI are more immediately gratifying because you can easier tailor the look of the language to your personal preferences. This however have a long term cost to maintainability and sharing in the community.

The power of Python is an emergent property caused by readability and clarity combined with the network effect in the community.

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