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Comment by makaronin | Hacker News Reader

Good work done, though Python may not be the best choice as it is a bit ancient programming language.

Since when is that a bad thing? (And Python really isn't that old.)

For algorithmic trading, speed is life.

Top parent was flagged and can't be seen now. But stock Python 2.7 code can be run under PyPy and it's very fast if speed is a concern. PyPy3 is in beta essentially so that's not a production-ready option if you're into Python3.

I'm a Python2 programmer who is making my "Python3 transition" over to Go. So I don't have much attachment to it, but Python code isn't slow. I'm moving because of the language leadership towards conservatism towards the language which is my philosophy rather than feature-creep and technical churn.

The CPython implementation is, and it's still always been fast enough for everything I've written, so the meme is slightly overblown as far as I'm concerned.

The top parent said:

> Good work done, though Python may not be the best choice as it is a bit ancient programming language.

So they weren't complaining about Python being slow (it is) but rather about it being "ancient" (not compared to C, or Fortran)

Ancient, you mean like C, C++, Java, Javascript, those languages?

Funnily enough, Python is actually older than both Java and JavaScript.

The programming languages you mentioned dominate their niches. What is left for Python? Being a former Python programmer (5+ years) i really don't see any reason to use it now.

There are excellent libraries for data analysis, I know some people who use it in finance. It's still widely used for web applications. There are new features for asynchronous programming. Not to mention it's used by tons of major companies. Linkedin, Reddit, Youtube, just to name a few all use Python.

Of course some legacy software is still in use. But i'm in doubt that python can be a good choice for today's startups.

Instead of a blanket criticism, perhaps you'd like to suggest some alternatives that:

- Have simple, pseudocode-ish syntax

- Are useful for exploratory programming with good speed of development

- Have a comparable amount of high quality libraries available along with tooling for their installation and management (standard and third part)

- Have large talent pools available with experience ranging from fresh graduates to grizzled veterans, and backgrounds ranging from science and statistics to journalism to finance

Playing devils advocate here, but Ruby's ticked those boxes pretty well in my experience. Also js if you don't mind sacrificing a bit of expressiveness (pseudocode-ish syntax).

Don't get me wrong, I do also love python and can see it being used for years to come. Also, I know of at least a couple of algorithmic traders using it daily.

Fair point. I suspect that the one area where significant differences can be seen between those and Python is in the communities and the types of libraries available. For example, I use Pandas most days, and I'm not aware of an equivalent/replacement in Ruby or JS. Also, I would suspect (not substantiated with evidence) that companies whose products are built around data science/wrangling/statistics may be more likely to benefit from experienced Python talent in those areas than they would from another language.

> i really don't see any reason to use it now.

>> 759 jobs for “python”

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs?searchTerm=python

Funny you should say that because in the last couple of years every time I hear of something neat in web development it's in Python. Especially in the HN community it's quite dominant.

Mind you, I'm a C# developer without any knowledge of Python so I'm not at all biased.

>ancient

Not really...

Well technically speaking it is about 25 years old. But modern python is maybe only 5 years old

Technically speaking, Python 3 is always about 5 years in the future...

This.

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