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A comment on Python Is Eating the World. Parent comment

Re:Python Is Eating the World by verttii on Monday August 12, 2019 @02:14PM (#20678231)
I feel what you're saying is that regardless of how subpar a language is compared to alternatives as long as it has community built specific libraries that solve your problems you're more productive using them than anything else.

Which is of course a fair point. A language by itself is probably not even in the top 3 considerations when choosing new tech. Stuff like runtime, ecosystem and the amount of available developers would probably be more important in most cases.

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Re:Python Is Eating the World by ernst_klim on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:37PM (#20679099)
> A language by itself is probably not even in the top 3 considerations when choosing new tech. Stuff like runtime, ecosystem and the amount of available developers would probably be more important in most cases.

Totally depends on a domain. In serious mission critical software you wont use libraries, but will use the language.

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Re:Python Is Eating the World by verttii on Monday August 12, 2019 @05:43PM (#20680350)
Yeah I don't disagree. But even there you would have similar other considerations besides the language. Like most still end up with C/C++ there even though there are others like Crystal, Nim, but you just don't find developers who know them easily, nor do you have any ecosystem support.
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Re:Python Is Eating the World by ernst_klim on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @03:15AM (#20683500)
> Like most still end up with C/C++ there even though there are others like Crystal, Nim,

Because C++ and C are significantly better than Nim and Crystal.

There are also Ada and Spark and aerospace and very critical stuff.

> just don't find developers who know them easily

We don't look for OCaml/Ada developers, we hire programmers, and they program OCaml and Ada. It's not a big deal for a good programmer to learn a language, especially while programming side by side with seasoned programmers.

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Re:Python Is Eating the World by p1esk on Monday August 12, 2019 @02:57PM (#20678661)
how subpar a language is compared to alternatives

In my 6 years with Python, the only dissatisfaction with the language I felt was from parallel programming. I switched to Python from C, and at the time, I missed C transparency and control over the machine, but that was compensated by the Python conciseness and convenience. Then I had to dig into C++ and I didn't like it at all. Then I played with CUDA and OpenMP, and Cilk+, but I wished all that would be natively available in a single, universal language. Then I started using Theano, then Tensorflow, and now I'm using Pytorch, and am more or less happy with it. It suits my needs well. If something else emerges with a clear advantage, I'll switch to it, but I'm not seeing it yet.

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