Python becomes the most popular language

[jfiresto]

So, continuing the above metaphor, some might argue that open and close braces are training wheels for learning how to logically indent. I am just joking. Either braced or brace-less works for me.

[Cerebus]

Let's go on a bit of a tangent, then, related to blocks delimiters.  (Python and Makefiles use indentation and not delimiters; and Makefiles' one is even more annoying, because it does distinguish between tab and space as the first character in indentation.  I avoid that mess by using four spaces per indentation level in Python, and only a single tab in Makefiles.)

It seems that those who dislike indentation, prefer braces AKA curly brackets, { and } as the block delimiters.  These are used in many languages (C, C++, Java, Javascript, Awk, CSS, Tex/LaTeX/MathJax) which makes them familiar to many.  Are there any better suggestions?

Again, one of personal favourites come to the fore, Algol68. As well as BEGIN and END for blocks (which isn't, and wasn't then, unique) it also has IF ... THEN ... ELSE ... FI, DO ... OD, CASE ... IN ... ESAC to make "unitary clauses" from "serial clauses". The great advantage here is the additional information provided to both the programmer and the compiler as to what kind of block is being closed.

Code: [Select]

void junk(void)
{
    for (i = 1; i <11; i++)
    {
        switch (i)
        {
            ...
        }
    }
}

Has a crowd of undifferentiated closing braces (which relies on indenting for easy human comprehension), whereas in:

Code: [Select]

PROC junk = (VOID) VOID:
BEGIN
    FOR i FROM 1 TO 10
    DO
        CASE i IN
            ...
        ESAC
    OD
END

it is immediately obvious which type of clause each closing 'brace' is closing.

Also, I don't think anybody dislikes indentation per se, merely the reliance on indentation for semantics.

[Cerebus]

So, continuing the above metaphor, some might argue that open and close braces are training wheels for learning how to logically indent. I am just joking. Either braced or brace-less works for me.

Another bit of English that people have difficulty with in here is the difference between analogy, metaphor, simile, allegory and literalism. 

Edit: And don't get me started on litotes ...

[mansaxel]

Also, I don't think anybody dislikes indentation per se, merely the reliance on indentation for semantics.

This.

[Picuino]

This is a flame war similar/analogous to the war between spaces and tabs. Just as futile and endless.
Does anyone really believe that Python should be less popular for using meaningful indentation?
Well, they are wrong. Python is popular, very popular, and I don't think indentation has had much to do against it. Rather, it may have been a factor in its favor.

[emece67]

.

[Picuino]

I have proposed several pages earlier to compare Python's library system with that of other languages (JavaScript in particular).
Someone, now I don't remember who, argued that Python libraries were not mature and settled.
On the other hand it has been argued that JavaScript has many more libraries than Python, but the number is not the most important thing. Are JavaScript libraries really better? It's not a language particularly dear to me, but if it turns out to have better libraries I'll give it a try.

[Cerebus]

This is a flame war similar/analogous to the war between spaces and tabs. Just as futile and endless.
Does anyone really believe that Python should be less popular for using meaningful indentation?
Well, they are wrong. Python is popular, very popular, and I don't think indentation has had much to do against it. Rather, it may have been a factor in its favor.

Again the fixation on "popular". If popular is the touchstone, then the McDonalds' burger is the best food in the world both in terms of gastronomy and nutritional value, except that we know it isn't. Why can you not get it into your head that discussing the merits and demerits of a programming language cannot be judged by popularity. Should we start to judge all-time musical talent by who currently tops the Billboard 100, no. Only dyed-in-the-wool Harry Styles fans would take a contrary position to that "no".

At this point it really is difficult to judge your position as anything other than unalloyed fanboyism, I can't think of one point that counts as a demerit in python's case that you've been prepared to concede. Even categorising what has largely been a balanced and reasonable discussion as "a flame war" lends credence to categorising your allegiance to python as wholehearted and brooking no criticism - a "fanboy" position if ever there was one. You just keep repeatedly coming back to the "popular == best" position.

[coppice]

Again the fixation on "popular". If popular is the touchstone, then the McDonalds' burger is the best food in the world both in terms of gastronomy and nutritional value, except that we know it isn't.

I remember when COBOL was the most popular language by far. It was never popular with me. I had nothing against it, but I never did the kind of work where it excelled. Any meaningful assessment of computer language popularity has to include "for doing xxxx". Otherwise the most popular language is mostly about which type of development work is hot this week.

[Picuino]

Again the fixation on "popular". If popular is the touchstone, then the McDonalds' burger is the best food in the world both in terms of gastronomy and nutritional value, except that we know it isn't. Why can you not get it into your head that discussing the merits and demerits of a programming language cannot be judged by popularity. Should we start to judge all-time musical talent by who currently tops the Billboard 100, no. Only dyed-in-the-wool Harry Styles fans would take a contrary position to that "no".

At this point it really is difficult to judge your position as anything other than unalloyed fanboyism, I can't think of one point that counts as a demerit in python's case that you've been prepared to concede. Even categorising what has largely been a balanced and reasonable discussion as "a flame war" lends credence to categorising your allegiance to python as wholehearted and brooking no criticism - a "fanboy" position if ever there was one. You just keep repeatedly coming back to the "popular == best" position.

I like Python's indentation system and others don't. Is it really a merit or demerit of the language? only tangentially, I don't consider it such an important factor.

If you don't like the term flame war, why are you writing in a way that could be construed as flaming?
I admit that I like Python.  from there to fanboyism is a long way. Others should admit that they are Python haters.

I have admitted before and on several occasions that this discussion serves me to learn more about this language I like (Python) and I learn both its merits and demerits. Both the things I like about the language and the things others don't like (sometimes the same things).
This gives me a broader opinion about the language and I think many others as well.

As for the equation "popular" equals "best" I agree that this is not the case on many (most) occasions.
In particular, programming languages have applications for which they are good and applications for which they are not. It would be foolish to try to program an operating system with Python any more than you would program a web manager in C.
My proposal is that in programming languages, popularity (number of programmers using it) does have some relation to its relative merit.
C has been for years in that position and it will not be precisely because of its demerits.
But I don't want to make a flame war out of this opinion, so I will try not to defend my opinion in order to do my bit to avoid it.


To get back to the interesting part, if I would like to address the merits or demerits of the Python library system compared to those of other languages.

[Picuino]

I can't think of one point that counts as a demerit in python's case that you've been prepared to concede.

Here you have it. I am going to start a summary and expand on it.

Merits and demerits of Python:

Speed:
Python imperative programming are slow. 50 times slower than C. (demerit)
Python can do very fast computations thanks to its libraries, such as numpy (merit)
Python has functional programming, faster than imperative programming (merit)

Code blocks and indentation
Python uses colons and indentation to separate blocks.
This is a merit for some people and a demerit for others.

Easy of programming
Python is very easy to program.
It is a good language to start learning programming. (merit)
This leads to a lot of code written by bad programmers. (demerit)

Code maintainability
Python helps to make code easily maintainable in the long term. (merit)

Libraries
Python has a large number of libraries (>300000).
Many for Artificial Intelligence, Big Data processing, Scientific, Web development. (merit)
Security issues relating the big number of libraries and dependencies (demerit)

Language updates
Frequent language updates that keep it up to date. (merit)
Frequent changes that are no longer compatible with previous versions (demerit)

Documentation and help
Python has many good free and paid manuals. (merit)
Python has a large, very active community of programmers from which help is readily available. (merit)

Multiplatform
Python is multiplatform and runs on Unix, Windows and Mac. Recently in a web client as well. (merit)
Cross-platform libraries present certain problems (demerit)

[Cerebus]

If you don't like the term flame war, why are you writing in a way that could be construed as flaming?

Casting mild criticism as "flaming" is characteristic of someone who (1) is very sensitive to criticism of the mildest sort, (2) has never been flamed or they'd know it for what it is. It's also a poor debating technique as it's characterising the person as being somehow "nasty" to you as a way to discount their arguments when in fact they're not.

As for the equation "popular" equals "best" I agree that this is not the case on many (most) occasions.

If you agree with that then, why, oh why, oh why, do you keep coming back to discounting whatever the last argument made was with words to the effect "but python is popular, very popular"? If you admit it to be a futile [non-]argument, why keep making it?

[Nominal Animal]

The great advantage here is the additional information provided to both the programmer and the compiler as to what kind of block is being closed.

Is it an advantage?  (I am undecided either way myself.)

For HTML, dedicated end blocks are an issue with human-written markup, since they are often erroneous.

Perhaps a compiler should be more strict than a browser, but then again, many programmers disable compiler warnings because they feel there are too many false positives there.

For Bash and POSIX shells, which have a somewhat similar blocking syntax (do...done, if...then...elseif...then...else...fi, and so on), I do not see any advantage of having a specific end-of-block compared to just a closing brace; and I do use Bash/Dash a lot.  (When editing dense code, I first copy it and spread it out with correct indentation, do the edits, then compact it back again, replacing the original. Perhaps others pride themselves in working directly on the dense code?  To me, reducing the likelihood of me making a typo or a thinko is more important.)

[Picuino]

If you agree with that then, why, oh why, oh why, do you keep coming back to discounting whatever the last argument made was with words to the effect "but python is popular, very popular"? If you admit it to be a futile [non-]argument, why keep making it?

Because I agree that the popularity of C, Python, Java, etc. stems in part from their merits as languages. But I don't want to continue with that argument, which I can see is not well received.

[Picuino]

If you don't like the term flame war, why are you writing in a way that could be construed as flaming?

Casting mild criticism as "flaming" is characteristic of someone who (1) is very sensitive to criticism of the mildest sort, (2) has never been flamed or they'd know it for what it is. It's also a poor debating technique as it's characterising the person as being somehow "nasty" to you as a way to discount their arguments when in fact they're not.

I don't dismiss your arguments, I read all of them with interest.
But there are sentences that are not arguments and try to be offensive. I don't consider myself a Python fanboy, but I'm not going to change my mind no matter how much you argue if my arguments seem better to me.

I also understand perfectly well that for many it is better to use tabs and for others spaces. No one is right and everyone is right.
The fact that I prefer spaces does not make me a fanboy of them and I understand that others have equally valid reasons for preferring tabs.
Arguing about that can be considered a flame war or a holy war. In any case there comes a time when all the arguments are exposed and there is no more to be gained by talking about it.

That's the reason I was trying to get back to a productive discussion about Python libraries.

[Cerebus]

The great advantage here is the additional information provided to both the programmer and the compiler as to what kind of block is being closed.

Is it an advantage?  (I am undecided either way myself.)

Well I've certainly found myself, after making substantial edits to a chunk of code (both my own, and others')  that uses the curly brace for everything, with a bunch of the little buggers all crowded together needing re-indenting to make sense of them, or been uncertain which "}" belongs to which "{" when trying to excise some code out of the middle of something for refactoring or simplification (easy if you're using an editor that allows block folding, hard if you're trying to edit a Jupiter firewall configuration with nothing more than SSH to your name).

For HTML, dedicated end blocks are an issue with human-written markup, since they are often erroneous.

Perhaps a compiler should be more strict than a browser, but then again, many programmers disable compiler warnings because they feel there are too many false positives there.

For Bash and POSIX shells, which have a somewhat similar blocking syntax (do...done, if...then...elseif...then...else...fi, and so on), I do not see any advantage of having a specific end-of-block compared to just a closing brace; and I do use Bash/Dash a lot.  (When editing dense code, I first copy it and spread it out with correct indentation, do the edits, then compact it back again, replacing the original. Perhaps others pride themselves in working directly on the dense code?  To me, reducing the likelihood of me making a typo or a thinko is more important.)

I personally tend to write with a higher proportion of whitespace to code than anyone else I know, I like my code to look tidy and structured as well as be it, and I still find the absence of cues as to what "{" belongs to what "}" a poor second to explicit types of ending tags. I end up putting a lot of "} // if (<whatever>)" and the like at the ends of anything significant.

[madires]

Libraries
Python has a large number of libraries (>300000).
Many for Artificial Intelligence, Big Data processing, Scientific, Web development.

At the same time it's also a drawback security-wise if you have to rely on several libs to be secure. This is a problem in general, not just for Python. For example, keeping a web CMS, forum or whatever framework with plenty of plugins safe is hard work as new security issues in the frameworks or plugins are detected all the time. Simply follow security related lists and you'll see how much can go wrong. A typical real world scenario is that a bad security bug is found in WordPress plugin X and someone adds that to his scanning bot to automatically seize control of WordPress instances running that specific vulnerable plugin. In a short time the bad guy controls 30k WordPress instances.

[bd139]

If you agree with that then, why, oh why, oh why, do you keep coming back to discounting whatever the last argument made was with words to the effect "but python is popular, very popular"? If you admit it to be a futile [non-]argument, why keep making it?

Because I agree that the popularity of C, Python, Java, etc. stems in part from their merits as languages. But I don't want to continue with that argument, which I can see is not well received.

Seeing as I’ve had a couple of Sunday afternoon beers I’ll kick off here. I am with you on this.

To note the discussions on here are mostly prejudice from bitter folk akin to slashdot circa 1999, primarily from academic backgrounds at best. Few have worked on large or complicated products and codebases.

I just did a monumentally long time (with some gaps) in the fintech market and it’s all Python, Java and C (and now some Go). Plus some sick fucks using C#. The market demand is insane for python developers and the reason is because of the language’s merits which are clarity, ubiquity and scope.

This thread and it’s participants represent 0.0001% of reality. Shrug and move on. And with that I’m moving on (and with no irony updating my eBay scraping python scripts running in AWS Lambda).

My next job will probably be python because really it’s the language least likely to hold me down and teabag me. C++ and JavaScript being the diametric opposite side of the fence.

[cdev]

Thats the disadvantage of using some popular frameworks/platforms.. Obscure ones may be better in that respect..

[SiliconWizard]

But it's running in circles: many of us have patiently pointed out that popularity and intrinsic merit had usually little to do with one another.
Analyzing the reasons why some language is popular is always interesting, but if you want to do it in a scientific manner, as any scientific study, you shouldn't come up with a preconceived idea of why this is so.
(To be fair though, "popularity" is essentially a sociologic matter, and while many these days are trying to pretend sociology is actually a science, well. Sure. )

Another point is judging "popularity" by basically how much people talk about some topic online (which is the main way TIOBE and such work) is flawed. The reasons people talk about something might be very different from one topic to another. The reasons why C has been "popular" for a long time may be pretty different form the reasons why Python has become popular. One telling example of this is, why C has been #1 or #2 for many years in TIOBE and the like, it did absolutely not tell you that that's the language for which there were the most developers in the world. It's been hard to find C developers for at the least one decade if not two, despite the language being classified "popular" in various popularity indices.

As to Python, if it works for you as a tool, that is perfectly fine. If you know its strong and weak points and use it accordingly, it's even better.

Now for those who would assume Python is a modern tool just because it's trendy, its inception dates back to the 80s actually, and it itself was inspired by the ABC language, from which it borrowed much of its syntax (yes, the one that is a bit controversial.) It was more or less meant to make code look like pseudo-code. The idea is old stuff already. Not saying that old is bad necessarily, just that those thinking that's part of what makes it a modern language, uh, nah.

[Picuino]

Libraries
Python has a large number of libraries (>300000).
Many for Artificial Intelligence, Big Data processing, Scientific, Web development.

At the same time it's also a drawback security-wise if you have to rely on several libs to be secure. This is a problem in general, not just for Python. For example, keeping a web CMS, forum or whatever framework with plenty of plugins safe is hard work as new security issues in the frameworks or plugins are detected all the time. Simply follow security related lists and you'll see how much can go wrong. A typical real world scenario is that a bad security bug is found in WordPress plugin X and someone adds that to his scanning bot to automatically seize control of WordPress instances running that specific vulnerable plugin. In a short time the bad guy controls 30k WordPress instances.

I imagine this applies only to web development (Django, Flask) How is Python compared to ubiquitous PHP? It seems to me that Python code tends to be more secure, considering that neither is entirely secure.

Or do you have a problem that can be encountered when installing libraries such as numpy and its dependencies?

[Cerebus]

If you don't like the term flame war, why are you writing in a way that could be construed as flaming?

Casting mild criticism as "flaming" is characteristic of someone who (1) is very sensitive to criticism of the mildest sort, (2) has never been flamed or they'd know it for what it is. It's also a poor debating technique as it's characterising the person as being somehow "nasty" to you as a way to discount their arguments when in fact they're not.

I don't dismiss your arguments, I read all of them with interest.
But there are sentences that are not arguments and try to be offensive. I don't consider myself a Python fanboy, but I'm not going to change my mind no matter how much you argue if my arguments seem better to me.

Trust me, if I was trying to be offensive you'd know it. However, that is not my style unless provoked beyond my tolerance. Fanboy is not, in and of itself, offensive, merely descriptive and was intended as such, you're being way too sensitive. Check out the dictionary definition if you don't believe me "s boy or man who is an extremely or overly enthusiastic fan of someone or something" (Mirriam-Webster). If it was generally received as pejorative they would say so, cf "asshole - usually vulgar : a stupid, annoying, or detestable person" (also Mirriam-Webster).

[Picuino]

For me it is offensive in the sense that I am impervious to arguments because I don't understand them or I don't want to understand them. It's as if you prefer tabs and you call someone who prefers spaces a fanboy because they don't want to think like you.

I am a person very little attached to militancy. And I also love to change my mind when I am really convinced that something is different from what I thought.
I find that science and technology are prone to these types of changes of opinion and I like that.

Throughout this discussion I've seen some loopholes in Python that I didn't know about (such as its inconsistency in newer versions that aren't backwards compatible)

[madires]

I imagine this applies only to web development (Django, Flask) How is Python compared to ubiquitous PHP? It seems to me that Python code tends to be more secure, considering that neither is entirely secure.

I can't answer that question. We have to wait until more Python is used for web frameworks. And we shouldn't assume anything regarding their security. There can be nasty surprises, as seen many times in the past. Also, it applies to anything, not just web stuff. Of course, it's less an issue for some data modeling run on a single PC, than something networked.

[Picuino]

I hope it doesn't happen like Excel.

Excel: Why using Microsoft's tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988

Excel autocorrect errors still plague genetic research, raising concerns over scientific rigour
https://theconversation.com/excel-autocorrect-errors-still-plague-genetic-research-raising-concerns-over-scientific-rigour-166554

An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/

Excel has ruined thousands of scientific investigations: six tips to prevent it from happening to you too
https://thenewstrace.com/excel-has-ruined-thousands-of-scientific-investigations-six-tips-to-prevent-it-from-happening-to-you-too/229595/