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Comment by KerrAvon | Hacker News Reader

My god, though, why Python 10 years ago? There were better languages available then, like Ruby or Perl. Was NumPy just too big a thing even then?

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The scientific Python stack (numpy, scipy, matplotlib + a plethora of more specialized things) were definitely a very big thing 10 years ago. Deep learning was just on the cusp of taking off in a major way, but in traditional numerical computing python was very big before that.

Ruby and Perl in HPC? I mean this in the nicest way possible if you’re being sincere, but I can’t tell if you are trolling or not

perl had some history in bioinformatics but ruby and php never made any inroads into science or HPC to the level Python has. Python has almost entirely replaced perl in this context.

I chose Python over perl about 25 years ago and never would have considered ruby or php (both seemed squarely aimed at web developers not scientists). I believe Numeric Python was released around that time, and it was a revelation- especially to matlab users, who recognized the syntax and behavior.

Yeah I did some bioinformatics work years ago and there were still a few Perl things, but not many.

I worked in an HPC lab at a medium-sized university around 10 years ago. Python was definitely the most popular interpreted language among the students. I remember it was years(?) earlier that MIT had switched much of its curriculum to Python.

Some older folks used Perl in places where others would've just written bash; mostly scripting invocations of actual number-crunching programs. Ruby would've raised some eyebrows for sure!

Yeah the switch was like '08 that MIT went to Python.

I think it is far from a foregone conclusion that Perl and Ruby are better than Python, or were ten years ago.

Python was definitely around and common 10 years ago. I did my Master’s 8 years ago and we had a python bootcamp for people not familiar with it and numpy was part of it.

You're not going to get traction using Ruby or Perl for a Ph.D. in astrophysics :)

The only ones judgy-er about using the "wrong" language than computer scientists are engineers and other scientists.

I reckon that's very true but it's important in one's closed work environment. If one bypasses accepted practice then one must be very good or have very good reason or both.

I love perl but it is awful at signal handling. The threading and shared memory interface are not as good as other languages either.

Python has a low barrier for entry and can be useful immediately to newer programmers. It is also fairly well rounded.

That being said, I am not partial to python as OP was with fortran, and steer around it regularly.

how are ruby and perl better solutions to how appalled you must be given your first sentence? if anything, they're just _different_ solutions that are based on personal preference and nothing more

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