Re:Green vs. Brown Programming Languages
by jokethrowaway on Thursday April 22, 2021 @08:11PM
(#26909628)
First we had web apps written in Java, then Perl, PHP.
Python's popularity for web app development came way later (django was released in 2005)
Python was originally written as a reaction to C & C++. It didn't really hit the mainstream for web apps until much later, granted, but when we compare it to the languages it was originally competing against, the difference is pretty clear.
Re:Green vs. Brown Programming Languages
by gameswithgo on Thursday April 22, 2021 @01:39PM
(#26905525)
Garbage collection got a clear productivity gain over not garbage collection. But it isn't clear that the various takes on GC languages, Python, Java, C#, Go etc have led to any one clear winner.
> Python, Java, C#,
Notably, we've had garbage collection for nearly as long as we've had programming languages - so this has been going on much longer than the examples you give would suggest.
I'd argue that Java ultimately failed to innovate over C++ in the way that Python did. It added GC, but it's still clunky and hard to work with. In that sense, it's more of a pre-Python language, even though it's a few years younger than Python.
This is what happened with Python. It provided a distinct productivity advantage over C & C++, and now no one writes web apps in C++ anymore. Granted, it's not just Python anymore, but newer languages learned from Python's success.