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0 pointsforrestthewoods4y ago0 comments

I would claim the tech revolution happened despite those terrible languages rather than because of them. The languages are popular because of inertia, not because they're good.

Python is popular because of the ML revolution. If ML didn't take off neither would Python's popularity. Is ML successful because of Python or despite Python? Well, the world is probably further along with Python than if it merely didn't exist. But if a different language that sucked less existed we would, imho, be further along than we are.

I'm not annoyed Python exists. I'm annoyed that its inertia is so monumental it's inhibiting further progress. We're at a local maximum and the cost to take the next step is really really really high. That's not Python's fault mind you, just the way things work.

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5 comments · 3 top-level

hjtkfkfmr4y ago· 1 in thread

As someone who uses Python since 2004, you got it backwards.

Python was popular before because it's very nice language. People wanted to use it for science to, so they wrote very good scientific libraries for it.

R was very popular for non-neural-network ML some years ago, yet it wasn't picked up for NN, because R kind of sucks for general programming. As the joke goes, the best part of R is that is a language written by statisticians. The worse part of R is that is a language written by statisticians.

Python was growing at accelerated speed year on year well before neural networks.

laichzeit04y ago

The runtime of R is it’s biggest downfall. Its single threaded nature kills it. I say this having used future::promise in a Plumber API to get some semblance of concurrency.

edgyquant4y ago· 1 in thread

No these languages are the drivers of the tech revolution. PHP was widely adopted because it allowed people to rapidly build personal websites and then those people went on to build companies with it. Python is popular in ML because of its syntax being close to pseudo-code and allowing people who aren’t programmers to interact with all the old math libraries you used to have write C and Fortran to use. JavaScript is popular because it made the web more interactive and thus a ton of people who made websites learned it as their first programming language when they were young.

Python and PHP are so big because of the languages themselves and their implementation, Js is a bit different in that regard I’ll admit.

forrestthewoodsOP4y ago

It's true that the tech revolution would not have happened if all code had to be written in assembly. And it's true the machine learning revolution would not have happened if all code had to be written in C.

Is Python better than assembly and C/C++ for ML? Absolutely. Is Python good? I don't think so. Other people might use that term, I do not. I think Python is a bad language that would be designed very differently it was built today. And we're stuck with its decisions because the inertia to change them is monumental.

It's not really the language's fault. As an industry we've learned a lot in the past 30 years! It would be a travesty if we hadn't made language design process! Unfortunately we haven't figured out how to effectively apply lessons to encumbered ecosystems. Case in point: the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 was an absolute disaster. And it only made tiny, incremental improvements!

dragonwriter4y ago

> Python is popular because of the ML revolution.

Python was popular, including for scientific use, before the ML revolution; in fact, the only reason it is associated with the ML revolution in the first place is it's preexisting broad adoption in scientific computing.

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