Python becomes the most popular language

[Cerebus]

Here, the symbol for not being able to drive at all, and not having any interest in fixing that, seems to be a Nissan Qashqai, specifically white color. And then, I'm sure this doesn't apply where you live, at all, so I don't make a post like yours about it.

Here, in Brit land, those always make me laugh. There is a certain upper class British accent that mangles the pronunciation of quite common words - "trousers" becomes "tryzzers", "fine" becomes "fyne" and so on. One word which will be important shortly is "cow", pronounced "kai" by this type. The sons and daughters of that class often end up in "bullshit jobs" such as Marketing and PR. The Qashqai not only would be promoted professionally by the sort I'm talking about, but also they seem to be the target market.

When ever I see a Qashqai I think of the way that the kind of accent I've mentioned would mangle the pronunciation of the words "cash cow", which is an English idiom for a product that just keeps the money rolling in (cf German Milch Cow). I can hear one of the upper class muppets gushing in a marketing meeting they're having to decide the name for the car: "O Giles, I love it! It'll be an absolute cash kai!", "Oh, how spiffing, let's call it the Cash Kai. We'll have to change the spelling to get a trademark. How about usings Qs?". It's either that, or someone with a normal English accent mocking the people who are the target market for the vehicle.

[Nominal Animal]

Nah, what you are saying is bullshit.

Because it was just a reflection what you said, you mean, what you yourself wrote is bullshit?  Weird, but I guess I have to agree with you there.

[nctnico]

Nah, what you are saying is bullshit.

Because it was just a reflection what you said, you mean, what you yourself wrote is bullshit?  Weird, but I guess I have to agree with you there.

Well, buying a car from a French (or Italian) brand is asking for trouble 

[eugene]

I say this once, and once only.

If someone decides to use Windows and pay Microsoft for a license, you need to crush their fingers so that they won't be able to touch any computer, ever.
That decision shows they are not interested in the long-term interests of the human race, and instead are driven by instinct, habit, social pressure, and advertisements only.

See, how superlative language becomes horrible, when you switch things you don't like with things you do like?  Food for thought, innit.

Nah, what you are saying is bullshit.

So then you do understand!

[tszaboo]

Nah, what you are saying is bullshit.

Because it was just a reflection what you said, you mean, what you yourself wrote is bullshit?  Weird, but I guess I have to agree with you there.

Nah, yours is just baseless fanboy-ism. Its also quite juvenile.

[tszaboo]

I said this before, and I say it again:
If someone decides to buy a Peugeot, you take their drivers license and throw it in the shredder. They are clearly not interested in cars, driving, safety or reliability, and they lack common sense and shouldn't be allowed on the road.

It's interesting how culturally dependent such ideas are; here, no one would ever label a Peugeot driver like that. In fact, I'd say getting a Peugeot would be the most neutral action imaginable, communicating boringly modest amount of interest in cars, driving, safety, reliability, and common sense.

Here, the symbol for not being able to drive at all, and not having any interest in fixing that, seems to be a Nissan Qashqai, specifically white color. And then, I'm sure this doesn't apply where you live, at all, so I don't make a post like yours about it.

It's universal:

BTW they have the same shitbox in the video than the roundabout guy.

[Cerebus]

I said this before, and I say it again:
If someone decides to buy a Peugeot, you take their drivers license and throw it in the shredder. They are clearly not interested in cars, driving, safety or reliability, and they lack common sense and shouldn't be allowed on the road.

It's interesting how culturally dependent such ideas are; here, no one would ever label a Peugeot driver like that. In fact, I'd say getting a Peugeot would be the most neutral action imaginable, communicating boringly modest amount of interest in cars, driving, safety, reliability, and common sense.

Here, the symbol for not being able to drive at all, and not having any interest in fixing that, seems to be a Nissan Qashqai, specifically white color. And then, I'm sure this doesn't apply where you live, at all, so I don't make a post like yours about it.

It's universal:

BTW they have the same shitbox in the video than the roundabout guy.

Your evidence against the Peugeot is a Top Gear segment, not a show to be taken seriously or they'd have had Leonard JK Setright hosting instead of Jeremy "Double Denim" Clarkson, and your powers of observation extend to labelling the woman driving a Peugeot as a man. Hmm, not wholly convincing...

[SiliconWizard]

The French are very creative; you can find a fair amount of roundabouts that are shaped like the Audi logo in France.

Oh really. I don't think I've ever seen any. Could you please show us pictures, as you apparently know France better than I do.
Or maybe you want to tell us what you mean by "shaped like the Audi logo", because to me this logo is four intertwined rings, and I can't fathom how a roundabout shaped like this would be like.

And ofcourse there is the one where the Arc du Triomphe sits in the middle.

This is a very large roundabout and rather tricky at peak hours when you're not used to it (first time I took it was a bit scary). But I don't know how else this could have been done over there without butchering the whole area.

Roundabouts are a nice way of making intersections much safer without the need to add traffic lights where they would make traffic much less fluid.

But I still don't know what this all has to do with Python.

[jfiresto]

Roundabouts are a nice way of making intersections much safer ... but I still don't know what this all has to do with Python.

That is left as an exercise for the reader?

[tszaboo]

Your evidence against the Peugeot is a Top Gear segment, not a show to be taken seriously or they'd have had Leonard JK Setright hosting instead of Jeremy "Double Denim" Clarkson, and your powers of observation extend to labelling the woman driving a Peugeot as a man. Hmm, not wholly convincing...

I'm sorry, but the amount of boneheaded, plain wrong opinionated comments in this thread, I thought everyone was expecting this.
Seriously, I haven't read a single comment for four pages which would be about python, and before that, it was "I have a lot of free time, so let's shit on python together, because it must be bad, even though I don't use it."

[brucehoult]

Your evidence against the Peugeot is a Top Gear segment, not a show to be taken seriously or they'd have had Leonard JK Setright hosting instead of Jeremy "Double Denim" Clarkson

While I have read many fine car and motorcycle reviews from LJK, there is one minor obstacle to having him host a TV show...

"‘Often perplexing and too often dangerous,’ was how I judged most French cars other than Citroen’s in the 1960s and early ‘70s but I was so pleasantly surprised as to be almost enchanted by the Peugeot 305 I also developed a soft spot for the Peugeot 505, which was never known at its best in Britain because its best variant, powered by the lightweight V6 Douvrin engine, was never imported."

[PlainName]

Roundabouts are a nice way of making intersections much safer without the need to add traffic lights where they would make traffic much less fluid.

We have roundabouts with traffic lights 

[nctnico]

The French are very creative; you can find a fair amount of roundabouts that are shaped like the Audi logo in France.

Oh really. I don't think I've ever seen any. Could you please show us pictures, as you apparently know France better than I do.
Or maybe you want to tell us what you mean by "shaped like the Audi logo", because to me this logo is four intertwined rings, and I can't fathom how a roundabout shaped like this would be like.

From the top of my head: Nantes on some entry road where Google maps takes us. But I've seen them in other places as well in France but don't ask where precisely; it is very possible I move through France more than you do and I can't remember all the roads I travel on 

[Cerebus]

Your evidence against the Peugeot is a Top Gear segment, not a show to be taken seriously or they'd have had Leonard JK Setright hosting instead of Jeremy "Double Denim" Clarkson

While I have read many fine car and motorcycle reviews from LJK, there is one minor obstacle to having him host a TV show...

Top Gear has been around a long time and Clarkson was one of the presenters as far back as 1988. Setright didn't take his current job of full time daisy pusher-upper until 2005, so there's every possibility that he could have had the job, but the idea that the BBC might employ a Top Gear presenter with actual in-depth knowledge and a sense of humour that tended towards 'brut' rather than a clown is clearly farcical.

[Monkeh]

The French are very creative; you can find a fair amount of roundabouts that are shaped like the Audi logo in France.

Ha! They've got nothing on us Brits, towhit the infamous "magic roundabout" in Hemel Hempstead:

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FNHVF1rnUKHw%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

I used to work in Hemel Hempstead and the roundabout is in fact much easier to negotiate from a driver's view than it looks to be from an aerial view.

Swindon has one too:

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Falchetron.com%2Fcdn%2Fmagic-roundabout-hemel-hempstead-ba1a2f1e-09f3-485a-9447-e44bd5b0711-resize-750.jpeg&f=1&nofb=1

There's one of those outside Heathrow, too:


I was not amused.

[SiliconWizard]

The French are very creative; you can find a fair amount of roundabouts that are shaped like the Audi logo in France.

Oh really. I don't think I've ever seen any. Could you please show us pictures, as you apparently know France better than I do.
Or maybe you want to tell us what you mean by "shaped like the Audi logo", because to me this logo is four intertwined rings, and I can't fathom how a roundabout shaped like this would be like.

From the top of my head: Nantes on some entry road where Google maps takes us. But I've seen them in other places as well in France but don't ask where precisely; it is very possible I move through France more than you do and I can't remember all the roads I travel on 

If it's on Google maps, surely you can post a google map picture of it then?

[Someone]

The French are very creative; you can find a fair amount of roundabouts that are shaped like the Audi logo in France.

Oh really. I don't think I've ever seen any. Could you please show us pictures, as you apparently know France better than I do.
Or maybe you want to tell us what you mean by "shaped like the Audi logo", because to me this logo is four intertwined rings, and I can't fathom how a roundabout shaped like this would be like.

From the top of my head: Nantes on some entry road where Google maps takes us. But I've seen them in other places as well in France but don't ask where precisely; it is very possible I move through France more than you do and I can't remember all the roads I travel on 

If it's on Google maps, surely you can post a google map picture of it then?

Any quick glance across that area shows they are very liberal with roundabouts and have no issues with joining them directly together:
https://goo.gl/maps/AgZVfnybpzgriDx19
(bonus crossover!)
The highways are also using roundabouts for their interchanges, sometimes incorporating cloverleaves with roundabout. So quite unusual, but still no overlapping roundabout.

We have roundabouts with traffic lights 

2 overlapped roundabouts with traffic lights, branching trams, 4 traffic lanes + bicycle lane:
https://goo.gl/maps/8hs7N1A7rEvPek9Z8
Wikipedia is a little out of date with its map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_roundabout

[SiliconWizard]

Well, sure there are many roundabouts. But I can't see any Audi logo. Maybe some weed would help seeing that, though. =)
Otherwise, I fail to see what would be weird about that, if you have a complex area with many intersections, you're bound to have roundabouts leading to other roundabouts.

The one type of roundabout that I don't like, and that are fortunately rare, are the oblong ones. Sometimes used when there are two intersections, too close to one another to put two separate roundabouts. Those are very annoying. Rare though.

[brucehoult]

Your evidence against the Peugeot is a Top Gear segment, not a show to be taken seriously or they'd have had Leonard JK Setright hosting instead of Jeremy "Double Denim" Clarkson

While I have read many fine car and motorcycle reviews from LJK, there is one minor obstacle to having him host a TV show...

Top Gear has been around a long time and Clarkson was one of the presenters as far back as 1988. Setright didn't take his current job of full time daisy pusher-upper until 2005, so there's every possibility that he could have had the job, but the idea that the BBC might employ a Top Gear presenter with actual in-depth knowledge and a sense of humour that tended towards 'brut' rather than a clown is clearly farcical.

If, for one, don't mind Chris Harris. Viki and Tiff were also rather good in the 1987-2001 time frame.

[Nominal Animal]

Nah, what you are saying is bullshit.

Because it was just a reflection what you said, you mean, what you yourself wrote is bullshit?  Weird, but I guess I have to agree with you there.

Nah, yours is just baseless fanboy-ism. Its also quite juvenile.

"When caught spewing bullshit, just attack the person who pointed it out."

In case you didn't catch it, I neither believe owning a Peugeot to be a sign of a bad driver, nor do I think there is anything wrong in using Windows.

(Don't let Tux fool ya.  It's my mascot, not my idol.  I'm the "theory is nice and all, but practical reality rules" kind of dude.)

Seriously, I haven't read a single comment for four pages which would be about python, and before that, it was "I have a lot of free time, so let's shit on python together, because it must be bad, even though I don't use it."

You must be quite a selective reader, then.

Three pages back, I again raised the question of whether "popularity" is something anyone should consider wrt. programming languages, especially Python.  nctnico and emece67 commented on that, which I replied to; that is, that we cannot design a programming language that could cater to "bad programmers" (as in, hold their hands and help them not write shitty code).

It was my unfortunate selection of human traffic patterns as an example, that started the automotive tangent.  There, my point was that we do have good algorithms and models we can apply to effectively model traffic; but it is a human problem –– as in, those who do this work do not supply fair inputs to get fair results, but let all sort of ancillary politics and popularity considerations to skew their design, and thus skewing the results.
(This also had a short tangent into algorithms, and that even when using neural networks, it is the input and control parameters to those networks that determine the outputs, not the "algorithm" itself; the "algorithm" really is like the car, with the inputs and control parameters or training material the driver.)

Your own post on Peugeot being a car brand that only those who should not drive own, is a perfect example of why I believe Python's increased popularity to be sinister.  (If you care to check out my previous posts in this thread, you'll see that I am actually a proponent of Python, and write Python code almost daily.)  That sort of thing rarely happens because of technical features; it is almost always more a social thing.

All this does tie into the topic – "Python becomes the most popular language" –, and exactly how that matters.
I do find the discussion interesting, because the wildly different viewpoints cover the topic much better than a single person ever could.
Granted, the actual development experience and problems encountered are more practical, and therefore useful to a wider audience; but just because you cannot see how the tangents tie into the original subject does not mean they do not.  I can see the connections quite clearly, and because I'm not particularly bright or socially adept, the majority of others reading or participating in this thread likely do so too.

If you don't grok the discussion, perhaps it would be better to just lurk or stay away, than to try and stop it or derail it, eh?

[tszaboo]

Nah, what you are saying is bullshit.

Because it was just a reflection what you said, you mean, what you yourself wrote is bullshit?  Weird, but I guess I have to agree with you there.

Nah, yours is just baseless fanboy-ism. Its also quite juvenile.

"When caught spewing bullshit, just attack the person who pointed it out."

In case you didn't catch it, I neither believe owning a Peugeot to be a sign of a bad driver, nor do I think there is anything wrong in using Windows.

(Don't let Tux fool ya.  It's my mascot, not my idol.  I'm the "theory is nice and all, but practical reality rules" kind of dude.)

Seriously, I haven't read a single comment for four pages which would be about python, and before that, it was "I have a lot of free time, so let's shit on python together, because it must be bad, even though I don't use it."

You must be quite a selective reader, then.

Three pages back, I again raised the question of whether "popularity" is something anyone should consider wrt. programming languages, especially Python.  nctnico and emece67 commented on that, which I replied to; that is, that we cannot design a programming language that could cater to "bad programmers" (as in, hold their hands and help them not write shitty code).

It was my unfortunate selection of human traffic patterns as an example, that started the automotive tangent.  There, my point was that we do have good algorithms and models we can apply to effectively model traffic; but it is a human problem –– as in, those who do this work do not supply fair inputs to get fair results, but let all sort of ancillary politics and popularity considerations to skew their design, and thus skewing the results.
(This also had a short tangent into algorithms, and that even when using neural networks, it is the input and control parameters to those networks that determine the outputs, not the "algorithm" itself; the "algorithm" really is like the car, with the inputs and control parameters or training material the driver.)

Your own post on Peugeot being a car brand that only those who should not drive own, is a perfect example of why I believe Python's increased popularity to be sinister.  (If you care to check out my previous posts in this thread, you'll see that I am actually a proponent of Python, and write Python code almost daily.)  That sort of thing rarely happens because of technical features; it is almost always more a social thing.

All this does tie into the topic – "Python becomes the most popular language" –, and exactly how that matters.
I do find the discussion interesting, because the wildly different viewpoints cover the topic much better than a single person ever could.
Granted, the actual development experience and problems encountered are more practical, and therefore useful to a wider audience; but just because you cannot see how the tangents tie into the original subject does not mean they do not.  I can see the connections quite clearly, and because I'm not particularly bright or socially adept, the majority of others reading or participating in this thread likely do so too.

If you don't grok the discussion, perhaps it would be better to just lurk or stay away, than to try and stop it or derail it, eh?

I think we are victim of double Poe's law.
I didn't write that everyone is here for dissing python.
I certainly don't like the discussion which is going the way: Python is popular, because people are idiots.

[Nominal Animal]

I certainly don't like the discussion which is going the way: Python is popular, because people are idiots.

That's just the currently most prevalent conclusion, because nobody has provided a better one.

Sure, there have been some members who do claim that popularity is indicative of fitness/usefulness/quality, but the tangential threadlets show that if we look at humanity on the whole, that does not tend to be the case: popularity has its own mechanisms, and is basically orthogonal to usefulness/quality.  There is a reason why marketing and branding works.

I could draw a parallel here to systemd and how it has affected Linux distributions in a negative way.  It was promoted primarily via social and commercial (primarily inside RedHat, now IBM) means, and not its technical prowess.  It since started metastasizing and gathering weakly related and even unrelated projects under its own project umbrella.  And as a project, systemd is definitely not interested in software engineering or software quality; only in popularity and achieving a dominant position.
A lot of people do not mind, but I do: there is a reason why Unix philosophy, modular design, and the KISS principle work in software design and engineering; and discarding those principles just to become more popular –– dominant –– is a bad deal.  (Just go read Debian discussions about adding user choice, and how adamantly systemd-umbrella-projects oppose that.  "Dominant" is very applicable there.)

Instead, consider the reasons why Python is becoming more popular.  Popularity itself is not good or bad; we need to examine why it is happening to form a rational opinion of the situation.

I use Python on the server back-end, but not because Python as a language is well suited for that task; because in practice, it is better than the other practical alternatives: PHP, Perl, and Ruby.  If back-end developers are satisfied with Python (or the other languages), why would anyone put any resources into developing something better?

I also use Python for user interfaces.  Because Python has a very nice Foreign Function Interface – I can interface my Python code to native dynamic libraries by only writing some glue code in Python –, I can use one of several widget toolkits to implement the user interface, and let my end users even modify it if they want, without having to expose any of my sekrit sauce (which I provide in a separately-licensed machine code dynamic libraries).  However, Python I/O is rather slow, and the way it insists on separating strings (str type) and byte sequences (bytes type) is definitely not optimal.  There are other features that others consider less than optimal.  In any case, if UI developers are satisfied with Python, why would anyone put any resources into developing something better?

I do not have enough experience in teaching programming (quantitatively, as in I haven't taught enough students to have a representative sample), to know whether Python being increasingly used as an introductory programming language.  I know it is definitely better than Java or Borland C, which are still very widely used in education, but I believe teaching a variety of programming languages instead of concentrating on one is a better approach.

I definitely do not want Python to gain a dominant status.  As an interpreted language, it revealed very important features (like how to do the interfacing to native machine code libraries right), but is very far from the best we can achieve, if we just keep at it.

And thus, the complexity in the topic reveals itself.

I'm hoping that the quick automotive detour jolts some other member's mind, that because of the detour, they describe an useful observation about Python (and programming languages in general) and the changes in popularity thereof, that would otherwise have left unsaid.  A linear discussion is not an exploration of the subject; but at least to me, the value of this thread is exactly in its exploration of the reasons for the increased popularity of Python.

[Picuino]

I don't think Python's popularity is due to its good features. But for a language to reach that level of popularity it is necessary that it has a minimum of good features.

The increase in popularity of Python I relate it to a greater interest in interpreted languages, because of the advantages of programming in Python to speed up the development of new applications, new features and maintenance, compared to other compiled languages.

There is also a feedback effect. The more popular a language is, the more support it receives for developing tools, libraries, tutorials, etc. This makes it even more popular.

[nctnico]

I don't think Python's popularity is due to its good features. But for a language to reach that level of popularity it is necessary that it has a minimum of good features.

The increase in popularity of Python I relate it to a greater interest in interpreted languages, because of the advantages of programming in Python to speed up the development of new applications, new features and maintenance, compared to other compiled languages.

There is also a feedback effect. The more popular a language is, the more support it receives for developing tools, libraries, tutorials, etc. This makes it even more popular.

In that light I would say that deployability and standarisation of Python need much more attention. C and C++ for example are governed by standards so their implementations aren't moving targets.

[Picuino]

In this regard, unfortunately, Python participates in the modern fashion of apps to renew themselves continuously or die.

Why is Apple obsessed with updates on the App Store?

Apple App Store appears to be widely removing outdated apps

And that behavior, for a language like Python (which I consider already established) is a mistake. Hopefully developers will realize that the supposed advantages of making so many changes do not outweigh the disadvantages caused by incompatibilities.