Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Will Python Become The Dominant Programming Language?
An anonymous reader shares their thoughts on language popuarity:
In the PYPL index, which is based on Google searches and is supposed to be forward looking, the trend is unmistakable. Python is rising fast and Java and others are declining. Combine this with the fact that Python is now the most widely taught language in the universities. In fields such as data science and machine learning, Python is already dominating. "Python where you can, C++ where you must" enterprises are following suit too, especially in data science but for everything else from web development to general purpose computing...
People who complain that you can't build large scale systems without a compiler likely over-rely on the latter and are slaves to IDEs. If you write good unit tests and enforce Test Driven Development, the compiler becomes un-necessary and gets in the way. You are forced to provide too much information to it (also known as boilerplate) and can't quickly refactor code, which is necessary for quick iterations.
The original submission ends with a question: "Is Python going to dominate in the future?" Slashdot readers should have some interesting opinions on this. So leave your own thoughts in the comments. Will Python become the dominant programming language?
People who complain that you can't build large scale systems without a compiler likely over-rely on the latter and are slaves to IDEs. If you write good unit tests and enforce Test Driven Development, the compiler becomes un-necessary and gets in the way. You are forced to provide too much information to it (also known as boilerplate) and can't quickly refactor code, which is necessary for quick iterations.
The original submission ends with a question: "Is Python going to dominate in the future?" Slashdot readers should have some interesting opinions on this. So leave your own thoughts in the comments. Will Python become the dominant programming language?
Is that a parody?
"People who complain that you can't build large scale systems without a compiler likely over-rely on the latter and are slaves to IDEs"
Sure, who needs good tools when you can just do the work of the compiler yourself?
I'm pretty sure - the day will come where even the author will be bored of checking datatypes and constraints in unit tests that have to cover all possible runtime paths. For me the future will be a language with a really strong type system, that can be verified by the machine as much as possible. You can't have systems crash after 4 days of number crunching because it finally reached that stupid mistake in one path that was forgotten in the unit tests.
We have computers to do that work for us, not the other way round.
Oh and of course we'll use machine learning as much as possible to automate the automating.
Python is to programming today what Basic was to programming in the 80's. With similar advantages and disadvantages.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
You mention "easier readability" but I wonder if Python gets any love among blind developers? I wouldn't want to be counting spaces in my head to determine where I'm at (you'd probably even have to turn on the reading-aloud of spaces, which would just drive me nuts!)