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Comment by imok20 | Hacker News Reader

And that's exactly the problem. In liberal arts educations (such as the one I'm receiving) or even at universities such as MIT, Python is the language of choice. It's great fun to teach, very easy to learn, but it's not an industry standard, and many would argue that it's too easy to use.

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I don't think you're giving Python enough credit. It's used pretty extensively everywhere from NASA to Google to hard science research.

I don't think it's reasonable to claim Python isn't an industry standard. It's used heavily in industry by large and fairly conservative companies and is even more popular with startups.

I think it's reasonable because there are very rarely any such things as standards in software development. Municipal building codes are standards. Drug testing regimens are standards. Programming languages are not standards. At best they are conventions, and only insofar as certain niche subset industries are concerned.

As for de facto standards, I don't think we should be paying much attention to them. I think it's very important to draw the distinction that software development currently has no standards (you might be able to argue for TCP/IP, where alternatives are only ever used because they fulfill some unique use case not covered by TCP/IP), because for as much as we want to call this industry "software engineering", we sure as hell don't treat it like any other field of engineering, for many of the reasons already mentioned.

I think the first step is to sit down and agree on some terminology. You can't even get two programmers to agree on what "Object Oriented Programming" means. No wonder we aren't treated like professional engineers. We don't act like them.

Most "industry standards" are de facto standards. We're not talking about laws here, or even open standards like C or Common Lisp. An industry standard is simply a widely-accepted practice, which is perhaps defined by the fact that it would not usually be questioned by a casual observer from that industry. Painting interior walls some shade of off-white is an industry standard. Using Python for scripting and application logic is an industry standard in the same way.

I wouldn't say that using Python for scripting is even a de facto standard in that sense. Don't make the mistake of assuming your experiences are normative.

Are you really saying that Python is "not useful"?

That was a mistake: Python is QUITE useful. But I wouldn't call it an industry standard. Corrected.

Really? Python seems to be showing up everywhere I look. I don't think I've seen any largish company in quite a while that wasn't using python for something somewhere.

It's spectacularly useful, and I personally really love using it - but to say it's an industry standard the way C or C++ are is to stretch the point a wee bit too far unfortunately.

Still though, we use some languages for teaching (like Pascal or Modula-2) which don't have the kind of industrial usage levels of C or C++, so we might see Python being taken up sooner rather than later. I think there are one or two courses already using it over here on a trial basis.

Being the introductory language of choice doesn't make it the language of choice. MIT kids learn the real stuff too.

Python is "the real stuff", and I'm always annoyed by the snobbishness that leads some people to dismiss it. Python is an excellent language, with a large user base, and some compilers in the works.

Just because C is hardcore and Lisp is amazing and Haskell is mind-exploding doesn't mean that Python isn't a great language.

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