Hacker News Reader

Comment by arnvald | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit surprised to see this article on GitHub blog, it feels more like something from dev.to - looking at the surface, with little actual insights.

Most of the provided reasons behind Python's popularity are true also for other languages - portable, open source, productive, big community. This can be also said about PHP, Ruby, or Perl back in 2000s. Why isn't Perl as popular as Python?

I don't think it's all about readability or productivity, but about tools that were built over the last 30 years that have been used in academia and now with the boom in ML/AI/Data Science, they made Python an obvious choice to use for the new generation of tools and applications.

Imagine that the boom in ML/AI didn't happen - would Python be #1 language right now?

View on HN

> Why isn't Perl as popular as Python?

I don't think there is a single reason, but it sure didn't help that the community self-destructed by trying to make an entirely new language after version 5 and still call it Perl. It took a lot of years to resolve that nonsense, and in the meantime many people moved on.

It also does not help that Perl is a creative language, useful but very much open to many different interpretations. Hiring a perl guy and expecting them to read someone else's code is a crapshoot. The upside to Python's strong cultural opinions on coding style makes it easier for one developer to pick up someone else's code.

> Imagine that the boom in ML/AI didn't happen - would Python be #1 language right now?

Probably not. But it wouldn't be perl, either. Javascript most likely. But the core usage of python for scripting was never predicated on ML popularity, so it would still be a pretty commonly used language. and javascript has many annoying warts too, so I think plenty of people would still choose to write django apps instead of node, whether ML existed or not.

The line noise complaint isn't without merit either.

One of the few programming language jokes I've liked enough to repeat is "Python in Perl for people who can't bring themselves to write Perl code"

As commented somewhere else in this thread, Python was clearly more ergonomic than Python, hand had a lot of mindshare exactly for this reason. I remember when Python was new and the not that professional choice, Perl was at that time for that niche. Now still I don't see a contender for a language where speed doesn't matter. Ruby has some Perlisms that really make it weird, PHP is tight to the web, and equally weird, these $s and @s are really bad for normal people. Python wins clearly when teaching somebody programming.

I’d say that Ruby and even Perl are a lot nicer for scripting than Python (due to the extremely low-effort unix interop). Python can do it but it’s a while lot more verbose and difficult for a beginner to learn than “anything inside a pair of backticks is run as a system command and you can interpolate variables”.

Python was friendlier for beginners than Ruby the first time I took a real stab at learning to code during a CNY holiday in 2008, but it wasn’t about the language itself. Ruby was harder then because many of the popular libraries and many of the tutorials were written by people who considered Windows support as an afterthought. It’s hard to express how frustrating it was to have my vacation days ticking down, hitting issues in one tutorial after another and having people suggest I install linux on a VM (a process where I hit still more snags).

People learning Python and PHP didn’t hit that hurdle. I ended up learning Flash on my Asus laptop a couple of years later and getting my start that way and not coming back to Ruby until six years later when I was a much more experienced dev.

> Why isn't Perl as popular as Python?

Perl was significantly more popular at one point, but it slowly lost traction while Python gradually gained traction over the years.

Better ecosystem for numeric computing is definitely a big reason for the success of Python, by the question is why Python gained a foothold in that niche in the first place. It think it is because Python is just a lot more accessible to people with different backgrounds. Perl really grew out of shell scripting as a supercharged alternative to Bash and Awk, but retaining many of the quirks for familiarity. Python on the other hand grew out of research in teaching programming to beginners.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com