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Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I'd say Python's crown as the go-to lightweight scripting and web development language was mostly ceded to JS.

It's still reigning champion of data science, and of course it has a huge number of uses and users still around, but it's not really cool or in vogue outside of those circles.

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Python has never been THE web development language, that's always been JavaScript. Python is one of the more popular server-side languages, and JavaScript has move from frontend to backend in the last decade too. Not sure whether this has really taken the crown of any backend-language.

And what is lightweight scripting? Isn't scripting by definition lightweight?

But Python overall is still very popular outside the Data Science-circles. Not sure where this claim is coming from.

> It's still reigning champion of data science, and of course it has a huge number of uses and users still around, but it's not really cool or in vogue outside of those circles.

This is a wild take. You're never going to get a fully accurate measurement but every source I've seen[0][1][2] puts Python as the most common programming language by a country mile.

If it doesn't seem "cool" or "in vogue", that's because everyone is already using it.

[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ [1] https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html#google_vignette [2] https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/upskilling/top-pr...

Do people really turn to JS (instead of Python) for lightweight scripting? Are we talking about the "better Bash" use case?

that would be very surprising

JS devs do, and there are a lot of them

I mean if its really light weight, and I want to avoid bash, then JS is not too bad. The downside being that the built-ins are not really there compared to Python.

The famous answer.... _it depends_.

I use "tsx script.ts" often and it's very nice good due to gradual typing you can use (plus I know lang well)

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