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Is Python Really the Fastest-Growing Programming Language? (stackoverflow.blog)
An anonymous reader quotes Stack Overflow Blog:
In this post, we'll explore the extraordinary growth of the Python programming language in the last five years, as seen by Stack Overflow traffic within high-income countries. The term "fastest-growing" can be hard to define precisely, but we make the case that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language... June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited [programming language] tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations. This included being the most visited tag within the US and the UK, and in the top 2 in almost all other high income nations (next to either Java or JavaScript). This is especially impressive because in 2012, it was less visited than any of the other 5 languages, and has grown by 2.5-fold in that time. Part of this is because of the seasonal nature of traffic to Java. Since it's heavily taught in undergraduate courses, Java traffic tends to rise during the fall and spring and drop during the summer.
Does Python show a similar growth in the rest of the world, in countries like India, Brazil, Russia and China? Indeed it does. Outside of high-income countries Python is still the fastest growing major programming language; it simply started at a lower level and the growth began two years later (in 2014 rather than 2012). In fact, the year-over-year growth rate of Python in non-high-income countries is slightly higher than it is in high-income countries... We're not looking to contribute to any "language war." The number of users of a language doesn't imply anything about its quality, and certainly can't tell you which language is more appropriate for a particular situation. With that perspective in mind, however, we believe it's worth understanding what languages make up the developer ecosystem, and how that ecosystem might be changing. This post demonstrated that Python has shown a surprising growth in the last five years, especially within high-income countries.
The post was written by Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson, who notes that "I used to program primarily in Python, though I have since switched entirely to R."
Does Python show a similar growth in the rest of the world, in countries like India, Brazil, Russia and China? Indeed it does. Outside of high-income countries Python is still the fastest growing major programming language; it simply started at a lower level and the growth began two years later (in 2014 rather than 2012). In fact, the year-over-year growth rate of Python in non-high-income countries is slightly higher than it is in high-income countries... We're not looking to contribute to any "language war." The number of users of a language doesn't imply anything about its quality, and certainly can't tell you which language is more appropriate for a particular situation. With that perspective in mind, however, we believe it's worth understanding what languages make up the developer ecosystem, and how that ecosystem might be changing. This post demonstrated that Python has shown a surprising growth in the last five years, especially within high-income countries.
The post was written by Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson, who notes that "I used to program primarily in Python, though I have since switched entirely to R."
Yeah, because searching through 1 page of error messages because you forgot a ; or } is *so* much better, especially when those have no immediate visual significance at all. Besides, *all* (sane) languages already have significant whitespace: voidFunction() and void Function() are two completely different things. Whitespace is significant in human languages, and there's no reason it shouldn't be significant in computer languages.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
3. Popular language have more libraries, frameworks, and run on my platforms.
Not necessarily. Python has Beautiful Soup, which is a terrible library, but popular. It's so popular that nobody has bothered to make something better.
I'm really not that surprised that Python appears to be the only language that continuosly grows it's popularity during the last 15 years.
It's easy to learn whilst at the same time being resonably well constructed and scalable towards larger projects. It also appears to be a language where, unlike Ruby, PHP and JS, people do *not* screw around and get their projects perfect from the beginning. There is basically one CMS written in Python and that's Plone, based on Zope, and that System has been ahead of everything else in the PHP and Ruby field in terms of architecture, design and utility ever since Zope came around in the late 90ies. Same goes for Django. One Webframework to rule them all. Unlike PHP or Ruby or JS where you have a mess of a bazillion different toolkits, every single one screwing around in their own specific quirkyness, Python appears to be the language of people who want to get shit done properly right away and then move on. Python, whilst being a very neat programming language, doesn't lend itself to self-indulgance. Maybe those twot traits are correlated.
Point in case: Python is the only language I know of that is to measurable extent being used professionaly in every field.
Research, engineering, game development, media, 3D, web, custom ERP, system administration, embedded, bioengieering, robotics, process automation, etc.
IMHO it speaks volumes if a language is that easy to pick up and at the same time is used in so many fields. AFAICT it is only dominated by PHP and JS in server and client side web for historic reasons. Would people have to decide today which language should rule the client and server-side web they'd probably pick Python for that aswell.
I also think that Python is a language that remains fun to programm in even if you use it for an extended period of time. Can't say that for PHP for example.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I generally prefer 3.x Python. What I really like is python when it works. But over and over and over, I have downloaded a library or some code that only runs on one or the other. Keeping both up to date and with the latest libraries is a huge pain in the bottom. The way I have it installed also seems to send some products for a loop when they simply insist that I must have 2.7 installed. So I go and change which version is "python" just so that program can run.
I really don't care what the arguments are for the lack of backwards compatibility; doing this really hurt python with a self inflicted wound.
The next self inflicted wound is the speed of python. I see these crazy arguments that in order to make it faster that it needs strongly typed variables. That is total BS as there are many scripted languages without this that run blazingly fast (JS, PHP, Lue, etc) without this.
Quite simply the people who are in charge of steering python seem to be way more interested in giving talks at python conferences than keeping python moving forward. Oh there are lots of little features being added, but nothing like the leaps and bounds that JS and PHP have made in the same time period. JS is not screwing up with a backwards compat problem. And PHP trimmed out some crud so is technically not backwards compat anymore but if you were using the features they cut, you were writing bad code.
Python rocks. I use it for ML, I use it for so many quick and dirty things. But all this means is that nothing is better right now. Look a perl. It owned the world of scripting 17 years ago.