'Unstoppable' Python Remains More Popular than C and Java - Slashdot

Posted by EditorDavid

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  The growth of python is likely being driven by the increase in GIS - Geographic Information Systems. Government (Fed, State, Local, Tribal, etc) GIS investment increasing significantly. Any mapping data, inventory (water lines, sewer lines, etc), watersheds, sea levels, traffic hot maps, parks and rec trails.. anything you can think of to map is being mapped. The king of mapping software is ESRI / ArcGis which uses python for automation and application integration development.

  • Re: its GIS

    I'm sure it's more than just GIS

  • No, it's the ice cream industry! I can attest that almost all coding for ice cream vendors is done in Python, and that's across the entire industry - Baskin Robbins, Cold Stone Creamery, Carvell, and everybody else. Most ice cream vendors are even replacing existing Cobol code with Python, and that includes the mobile ice cream truck companies. It's a powerhouse.

  • Re:

    Python is popular these days because many universities use it as the first programming language they teach. That is the entire reason.

    • Re:

      Used to be BASIC or Pascal
      
      Congrats python lovers... you're BASIC

      • Re:

        Please don't compare BASIC to pascal. BASIC was never thought in university as far as I know, maybe in kindergarten schools.

        Comparing Python to BASIC is fine with me although. If it's true they now teach Python as a first language in universities, this really constitutes a sad race to the bottom...

        • Re:

          taught:)

    • Re:

      That is the case for physics, chem E, and other hard science and engineering but not for CS. The reason for this is that universities are cheap with providing technical support for STEM research and the only support they get is basic system administration. And Python is a good sys admin language. So if you are a physics professor that needs to do some stats to evaluate the data from an experiment you use Python. Now there are at least 6 languages that are better suited to that task but a professor of Ph

      • Re:

        It started changing 20 years ago. CMU was the first major university to use Python. Now even Berkeley and MIT have beginning level CS classes in Python.

        Your knowledge is way out of date. Better do some research and update it.

  • Re:

    I doubt it is GIS. I would think it is more about data science. You know, the PhDs in Physics that for some reason do Machine Learning and other analytics work for most companies (even though Physics uses P-values and ML uses raw distributions so there is almost nothing in common between the two fields). And even though their job is to write code, the only language they know is Python (and they aren't learning another even though Python is very poorly suited for ML work). I would point at them as the re

• I'm more interested in what languages are actually used rather than what are popular darlings.

  https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]

  Another thing to know almost as useful as that, or more useful if job hunting, is what is in demand:

  https://bootcamp.berkeley.edu/... [berkeley.edu].

  • Re:

    That statista site lists HTML/CSS as a programming language. IMHO, that immediately calls their statistics into question.

    • Re:

      On the other hand, if a person only knew that they could get a job.

• Just another example of popularity having nothing to do with quality.

  • Re:

    I have to agree. I refuse to use python.

    Too many pointless syntax changes in python requiring old code to get fixed to use a newer version.

    The language is a nightmare from a old code point of view.

    It might be great as a one and done usage, but not for any system that needs to get maintained.

    • if you are referring to python 2 to 3 that was a "one and done" event a long time ago.

  • Re:

    Python is actually quite good, depending on your application. Currently I'm picking up C++20, which is a bit difficult since my main experience with C++ dates back to before the STL, but it's the right choice for what I'm doing. (Well, I hope it is. That will depend on whether I can properly debug things. STL is nothing like what I was familiar with. But shared_ptr is a good alternative to garbage collection.)

  • Re:

    hey! this is a very-very-very important report by tiobe, a select group of high quality smoke resellers that are sincerely worried about quality in the software celebrity arena and honestly devoted to trumpeteering their efforts across all social media, brought to you via a state of the art parasitic media delivery chain! have some respect you insensitive clod!

• Rust (Score:2, Interesting)

  I am surprised Rust is not on this list. Itâ(TM)s such a great language.

• by pz ( 113803 ) on Saturday August 13, 2022 @03:48PM (#62786592) Journal

  If only Python could be changed so that...

  (a) indenting whitespace was not syntactically important (we collectively understood that was a bad idea, what, fifty years ago?),

  (b) it was faster than 1990s era Visual Basic 6. And before you flame me on that, I have a solid data point as I'm converting a VB6 application I wrote to Python. Even with numba's jit compilation and numpy, it's not faster than 20-year old VB6 that lacks basic optimizations like common subexpression elimination.

  • Re:

    Or it could be that:

    a.) You're in the minority, because despite what you consider to be a bad idea, Python is wildly popular;

    b.) You're a bad Python coder, but you used to be good at VB6.

    • Re:

      Both can be true. Syntactically important white space is a bad idea and Python is popular despite this "feature".

      Also, the minority is perhaps larger than you think -- I also think it's a bad, and unnecessary, idea too -- and perhaps Python would be even more popular w/o this "feature". Personally, as far as scripting languages go, I'm more of a Perl fan -- having learned it before Python was invented...

      • compared to ...

        If there were a non-whitespaced Python, how popular would that be?

        
        I often say to myself "I wish there were a pre-processor that let me use some begin/end markers". With editor and pretty-printer support.

        
        But the whole idea is to have as little boiler plate as possible, and I support that idea.

        • Re:

          I imagine Python could be updated to allow block delimiters but not require them. I also imagine then that over time using delimiters would become more prevalent in Python -- probably because of increased clarity and similarity with other languages, like C, Java, Perl... basically most other languages. Companies / managers like to pick programming "standards" to use and I can easily see requiring programmers to use block delimiters in Python, like other languages, as the preferred case.

    • Re:

      "a.) You're in the minority, because despite what you consider to be a bad idea, Python is wildly popular;"

      It's wildly popular because its useful in a lot of current growth areas, in spite of the semantic indentation, not because of it.

      But there isn't a single real advantage to semantic whitespace.

      Let me be clear -- Indentation is good, consistent indentation is good, and indentation to reflect semantics is good, but whitespace should reflect semantics not define them, and it should be done with a pretty-p

  • Re:

    it is wildly known that vb6 is faster than python. i wonder if that will still be true after python's upcoming release

    • Re:

      Well, I didn't know it. I wouldn't be surprised either way, honestly.

      • Re:

        OP doesn't know the difference between widely and wildly, it's not surprising he believes things that are not true

  • Re:

    I don't think there's general agreement that whitespace indentation is a bad idea. I'm not really fond of it, it's it's not that bad. I think of it as a quirk, and there isn't a language without its quirks.

    • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    " (we collectively understood that was a bad idea, what, fifty years ago?)"

    Then how did makefiles happen 46 years ago?

    • 1 hidden comment

    • Re:

      Knowing that something is a bad idea doesn't stop everyone. Some people want to watch the world burn. Semantic whitespace is an unnecessary complication.

    • Re:

      as explained by the author of the original Make, Stuart Feldman:

      I used tabs because I was trying to use Lex (still in first version) and had trouble with some other patterns....
      So I gave up on being smart and just used a fixed pattern (^\t) to indicate rules.
      Within a few weeks of writing Make, I already had a dozen friends who were using it.
      So even though I knew that "tab in column 1" was a bad idea, I didn't want to disrupt my user base. So instead I wrought havoc on tens of millions.

      I have used that exam

  • Re:

    Python users disagree with (a)
    Regarding (b) you are just dumb.
    Visual Basic is compiled to machine code, Python is not.

  • Re: if only ...

    But if you take away the semantic whitespace, what would be left of value?

  • Re:

    I first heard the arguments about speed in 1962 when I was writing some calculations in Fortran from dyed in the wool assembly programmers. That argument is a silly today as it was then. Python on modern computers is fast enough for most uses. Note there is no benefit from unused CPU cycles or memory space for that matter.
• Not even Python is immune from infinite loops.
• Yes. The domains of hell are widening. I will never escape.

  • Re:

    yesss. can we start to rot now?

    • Re: Python is my hell

      I pray to the gods of management to change our ways and save my soul.

• What's it actually comparing? Not all these languages are appropriate, or even used, for all the same/similar applications. In some sense it's like comparing apples and oranges. Python or Java vs. JavaScript -- really? The "popularity" being measured may simply be a reflection of the types of projects or the people implementing them.

  • Re:

    It's comparing the popularity among educators, not professionals. Students use google. Professionals use the reference manual. Also, TIOBE has a financial interest in getting people to build large applications in untyped languages.

• by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Saturday August 13, 2022 @04:40PM (#62786704)

  It looks like Monkeypox is becoming more popular as well!

• ...now either you code in python or in matlab. I am looking for a new job.

• Python is very popular among tech-adjacent people because the barrier for entry is low - it's easy to quickly pick up enough to be able to hack together something that's useful without being an expert.

  And that's not intended as an insult. It's similar to what we used to use BASIC for, way back in the day.

  Python is certainly also used by professionals (it's all over the place in RHEL, for instance)... but I doubt those are the people driving all the web searches that determine these particular rankings.

• In the alternative Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index, which assesses language popularity based on Google searches of programming language tutorials, the top 10 rankings for August were:
  1. Python, 28.11% share
  ...

  So... Python ranks highest in number of people trying to figure out how to use it.
  Not sure that's the metric to aspire to.:-)

• I find that I am using python a fair bit recently, it seems like an ok language and there are libraries for everything you can think of. I am surprised that go and rust didn’t make the list, they are growing in popularity very quickly. I like working with go for anything web based.

• So what? Perhaps uses of Python become more popular. Each tool is good for certain uses. How popular is Python in deeply embedded (as in "your electric toothbrush") applications?

  • Re:

    Python is the glue holding a lot of data centers together. I don't like programming in Python and I will likely stick primarily with C/C++ for the rest of my life, but I'm willing to admit that a whole lot of people are using it in the services that I need every day.