Is Python Really the Fastest-Growing Programming Language? (stackoverflow.blog) 254
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."
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Humph. Who in hell cares? I personally enjoy programming in python, but I certainly make such choices based on whether or not something is "popular".
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Exactly!
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Popularity matters.
1. If a language is unpopular, there may be good reasons. Examples: Ada, Modula-2.
2. Popular languages have a community of users, so you don't just get more questions on Stackoverflow, you also get more answers.
3. Popular language have more libraries, frameworks, and run on my platforms.
4. If a language is popular, you can get a job writing code in it.
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But if a language gets too popular, the only job you can get is writing code in it.
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No, if a language gets too popular you won't get a job writing code in it because everyone else will want the same job as you.
Pick something like Fortran or Cobol? You'll be able to count the job offers on one hand but you won't have much competition for those jobs.
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The downside of an unpopular language is that if there's only 50 companies using Cobol and their numbers are decreasing every year, then your job will be on the chopping block sooner or later. W
Keeping it as a hobby and nothing more (Score:2)
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Who only knows one language? The last time I only knew one language I was probably 15.
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Well when you're 18 you might have to deal with HR drones. They already require 2n years of actual paid experience where n is how long the thing has existed, so splitting your time among multiple languages doesn't help.
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How does spending all your time on that one language for n years get you 2n years of experience anyway?
If you get an interview for a job posting with that kind of requirement, then you should bring it up in the interview. Tell them that the experience they are looking for will be impossible to find without a time machine. If you're the only candidate who brings this up, then it shows that either a) you're the only one who isn't lying, or b) you're the only one who knows what they're talking about.
If other c
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So stop writing code that everyone else can write.
I make my living writing Python and Matlab. I have a Mechanical Engineering degree and there's little to no competition on job sites.
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So stop writing code that everyone else can write.
I make my living writing Python and Matlab. I have a Mechanical Engineering degree and there's little to no competition on job sites.
This. I write cryptography code. I've found it very difficult to be unemployed.
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Well no. It's not like that at all.
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Knowing Fortran can be a big plus to add on to Matlab. There are still maths-related programming where the executable quality matters more than the source code, and knowing Fortran gives an edge.
It's easy to think that everything can be solved by throwing more abstractions and more hardware to handle the abstractions at the problems, but sometimes you end up in situations like embedded or microcontrollers where you have very little wiggle room. When you have to count nibbles, interpreters are quite out of
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The NOAA is converting over their climate data to a new data format, and email correspondence with them (due to many issues with the conversion) has revealed that they are using Fortran for at least some of this conversion process.
Yes, I know one of the people auditing their conversion. Its horrendous display of incompetence, but thats a separate issue. Fortran is in fact still widely used by the scientific community, and while Python is getting some adoption so is Julia and Julia i
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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THat's because the idea of pulling data out of HTML is a horrible idea. Provide a real API. If the site doesn't, you should consider paying for access to their data in a sane way rather than writing a fragile algorithm to screen scrape it.
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Try to do anything not overly engineered in Java enterprise edition?
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If you're looking to scrape html there are other libraries. Recently I used lxml [lxml.de], seemed very powerful and straightforward. What I was doing was fairly simple, but I was able to throw my script together within a few minutes of downloading the package.
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Python has Beautiful Soup, which is a terrible library, but popular. It's so popular that nobody has bothered to make something better.
Sounds like the Python equivalent of Oleg Kiselyov's SSAX/SXML libraries for Scheme, with the difference in library qualities reflecting the difference of language qualities. ;)
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>Beautiful Soup, which is a terrible library, but popular
Love the straight face humor in this sentence.
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4. If a language is popular, you can get a job writing code in it.
Let's state this more clearly: if a language is popular [in the business universe and has a proven track record of having money making applications written in it], you can get a job writing code in it. ftfy
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(My ((God) Man). (You (left ((out)) all) the) parentheses!!!)
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I can't say that I agree or see anything that's inherently better about Fortran than C.
Assuming that by 'better' you mean resulting program running faster: array handling and lack of opaque pointers.
In C, array is just a memory block with bit of fancy access syntax. In Fortran, array is a a construct understood as such on compiler level and because you cannot do so many tricks with pointers, compilers is allowed to do certain optimalizations impossible in C. Example - it can change layout of array to better fit cache lines on CPU.
https://scicomp.stackexchange.... [stackexchange.com]
Yes, contemporary C compilers
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You mean something like "1.0 if X else 3.1416" -- which is legal Python and does what you'd expect.
OK, I have to admit. I haven't seen a FORTRAN program since about 1988. And I have no idea what part of the language a FORTRAN arithmetical IF statement might be. But I have to say that I don't especially miss FORTRAN although I do think it's a hell of a lot more readable than C, C++ or Perl.-- all of which tend to look like a terrier has been banging enthusiastically on the keyboard.
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Your embedded should be 'embedded', in the same way 'embedded' linux rocks.
Yes it does, however it doesn't come within a mile of true embedded uses, where any unrequired resources mean extra device cost, which is to be avoided.
True embedded these days generally means 'runs on the included storage/memory within a microcontroller', and that is a stretch for embedded python.
However it does fit quite nicely into the hobbyist 'cracking an embedded nut with a sledgehammer' approach, where huge storage, memory, an
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GP might mean "embedded" in the sense of embedded in a C program as a scripting language.
Re: Who cares? (Score:2)
Or that all these coding camps (typically taught in Python) are attracting less competent developers.
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Is that an instrument for measuring your network?
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Popularity can also be a flash in the pan. Ruby, anyone? How about Rust? Is Go still going or can we add it to the pile of "once been hip" languages?
Python suffers from a very, very serious problem when it comes to long term popularity: Code longevity. Ponder for a moment what kind of stuff you code in Python. Code that you refine and improve over time? Or is it more your tool to whip something together on the spot?
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I have been reading about Python for 20 years back when interviews said what the hell is Python and why haven't you used Perl. Ruby still is insanely popular and employers are struggling to find qualified applicants. Python like Ruby is not going away
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Ditto. Besides, like all scripting languages that have mushroomed over the last few years, Python has some ridiculous drawbacks. Who wants to use a programming language where deleting a space at the beginning of the line will prevent the code from running?
I hate semantic whitespace, but even then, your argument could be parameterised as "Who wants to use a programming language where deleting a {char_name} at {position} will prevent the code from running?" for many different char_names and positions, covering every single language.
But despite the nuisance of semantic whitespace, Python is still my main language at the moment because no-one has yet pointed me to a language that handles lists as cleanly, and all my programming tasks these days involve lists of
Re: Who cares? (Score:2)
That's a silly generalization, because most characters are printing. But the real problem isn't that changing whitespace will make Python code not run; the worst case is that it silently changes the behavior of the code. I've lost track of how many times Python code at my workplace has had long-standing bugs because of simple typos.
not looking to contribute to any "language war"... (Score:2)
Talking about languages and then claiming you don't want to contribute to a language war is on par with, "I'm not a racist but..." because it's counter to what you are saying.
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I'm not a racist, but whitespace having any sort of significance is pants-on-head retarded.
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So what colour should the space be?
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Burnt umber.
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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.
Re: not looking to contribute to any "language war (Score:5, Insightful)
People complain about semantic whitespace in Python because that's a pants-on-head stupid detail to make people pay attention to. There are enough things that need attention that invisible characters shouldn't be one of them.
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You are criticizing Python where you should be criticizing ASCII. Python uses positioning, specifically indentation, to indicate structure. Nothing wrong with that.
What sucks are the ASCII methods for positioning text. The tab character is a mess, and everyone appreciates that. What isn't so appreciated is the lack of any succinct way to indicate indentation. Leading spaces is a horrible way to do it, but it's the only way ASCII can do it. It's extremely redundant, it forces the use of a fixed width
Re: not looking to contribute to any "language war (Score:3)
Python's type-related problems are not because of duck typing. They are because it uses a damaged mix of strong and weak dynamic typing. You get None when you read an undefined field of an object, no error if you store to a field nobody ever reads, no warning if you store a string like '123' to a variable that normally holds a number, and an exception if you try to divide that variable by 3.
And don't get me started on the egregious breakages between Python 2 and 3, like changing the definition of the /
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Re: not looking to contribute to any "language wa (Score:2)
Data comes over the network, and sometimes it's not in the representation you want. SELECT smallint_column FROM mysql_table, and Python's bindings give you a string. The language accommodates the mistake up front, and raises an exception long after the initial mistake. Yes, this is a fault in the language.
Re: not looking to contribute to any "language wa (Score:3)
The solution to Python having problems is not to pancake more awful ideas (like ORMs) on top of its rotten foundation, making an ever-more-precarious edifice of fail stacked upon fail. What are you, a Python programmer?
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#whitespacesmatter
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Significant whitespace is the least objectionable thing about Python. Just ask any Haskell programmer.
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I'm not a racist butt?
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He said "contribute to a language war". Learn to read.
yeah, i read it (Score:2)
Survivor Bias? (Score:2)
Perhaps "Survivor Bias [wikipedia.org]" is not the right term but traffic to sites to ask questions may not be a good indicator of a language's popularity. It is an indication of questions people had about the language.
For example, when is the last time you asked a question about C? Probably never. Why? Because its very easy to understand and the libraries are also easy to find.
I'm not saying anything about Python. I'm just saying that looking at the number of questions may not give valid results.
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I'm not saying anything about Python. I'm just saying that looking at the number of questions may not give valid results.
It gives valid results -- but not for what they are claiming. As you have effectively pointed out, what they are measuring is "how many people have questions about language X, and how does it change over time"?
Obviously a language that gets a lot of questions is popular, however as you say a well-designed, well-known language isn't going to get as many questions.
Of course, it also doesn't touch on the quality of questions. How many of those Python questions wound up with the answer being "you only have se
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Well, it is pretty easy to assess the quality of any given piece of Python code. Just determine the ratio of whitespace to printable characters. Experienced Python programmers make these estimates all the time, just by eyeballing the code, and often without even thinking about what they are doing.
This seems to be a big part of Python's popularity: the ability to look at someone else's code and instantly form an opinion about whether "this is crap" or "this is the good stuff" without ever having to parse a
Re: Survivor Bias? (Score:2)
I disagree. LaTeX can make printouts of *anything* look good, even if your source material is something like lemonparty or tubgirl.
Ob (Score:2)
It's growing even faster than you think, because half of it is invisible.
The cool kids use Erlang not Python or node.js (Score:2)
It's one badass language for hipsters [youtu.be]
Because of inclusion with visual studio 2017 (Score:5, Informative)
For those in Linux land you maybe surprised but visual studio is now free with the community edition. It also includes Python and R with win64 optimized versions of idle and Cython.
Many people on Windows are wondering what it is since it's a huge section in the installer. This is probably what is causing the boost
C is 40 years old (Score:2)
Not to mention, C/C++ programmers have been using those languages for 20-40 years. Python programmers are n00bs, most learning their first language.
That said, I love Python and have been using it off and on some 15 years now. I hate the whitespace instead of curly brackets convention, but that ship sailed years ago,
Python is the Most Troublesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Traffic to Stack Overflow is an indication of people having issues with Python. Not it's popularity!
Traffic for high-income countries (US/UK) is misleading, since they are using this troublesome language more often. Non-English speaking countries don't want to use it, due to the default ASCII character set.
Seems the researches need to understand how Stack Overflow is used before making such a misleading statement.
A higher score on Stack Overflow Trends would indicate the inadequacies of the language.
More visits indicate the level of frustration, not the languages popularity.
GitHut [githut.info] tells a different story.
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That's because coding bootcamps require github pages for their graduates with the old school mistaken assumption no one gets hired without one
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Sure, but which source of data presents an 'more' accurate picture of a programming languages popularity?
The percentage and growth of:
a. Developers asking how to do {x} in programming language {y}?
b. The number of unique public repositories using programming language {y} on a site like Github, Bitbucket, etc?
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Pieces of JavaScript infrastructure (such as npm) push their ecosystem towards Github so there's an inherent bias there (plus do believe that Vim script/VimL really is more popular than Perl for projects as your GitHut link suggests via Active Repos). Also just because a language is troublesome doesn't mean it can't be popular too. In all honesty I'd guess both what you've presented and what stackoverflow have presented are about as inaccurate as each other. Python's popular, JavaScript is popular, some peo
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Traffic to Stack Overflow is an indication of people having issues with Python. Not it's popularity!
There's another option: Python is a popular first language for beginning programmers, so the issues people need help with are general programming concepts, not problems with the language itself. Not knowing the difference, the beginning programmer will stick a [python] tag on the question, and hey presto, "lots of Python questions".
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Everyone at this point should be using python3 which doesn't have any such restrictions. Python2 will be formally deprecated in 2020.
It's a requirement for a lot of things now (Score:2)
It used to be that everything was based on bourne shell. Then everything was based on perl. Now everything is based on python. Hopefully something which doesn't make so much importance out of whitespace will be next.
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Hopefully something which doesn't make so much importance out of whitespace will be next.
OhyeahliketheEnglishlanguageandprettymucheverynaturallanguageoutthere.
Re:It's a requirement for a lot of things now (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully something which doesn't make so much importance out of whitespace will be next.
OhyeahliketheEnglishlanguageandprettymucheverynaturallanguageoutthere.
That's a very stupid thing to say since the argument is not over single spaces, but over using some number of spaces instead of punctuation. If natural languages worked that way, it would be a nightmare. We have one space, and we have an indent, and that's it, especially since double-spacing has died with typewriters.
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Re:It's a requirement for a lot of things now (Score:5, Insightful)
If you use a good modern editor like Microsoft Code, Atom, Brackets, or the bazillion other electron node.js based and not Vi or Emacs it will indent for you.
That does not solve the problem of copy and pasting code samples, and losing the formatting information. This is exactly why we have punctuation in written language. You can discard the formatting entirely and still make sense of the content. This is also exactly why using indentation to denote control flow is an idiot move which should have been permitted to die with punch cards. Once upon a time, it was actually a convenient convention. Today, it is purely inconvenient. Once that information is lost, it is gone forever. If control flow is denoted with punctuation, you can simply feed the code to an autoindenter, but no such thing can be created for python. The best an IDE can do is assist you with indentation while you write, it can never restore lost indentation.
This problem is older than computing, and so is the solution. That anyone would create a language which discards this basic tenet of modern language technology is pathetic, and that anyone would defend that decision is doubly so.
Unix of today is compromised by users and developers who do not understand it. On the one hand we have the proliferation of python, created by people who apparently want to turn back the clock to a time when mainframes and minicomputers dominated, and you had to enter code and data in the correct column. And on the other, we have the proliferation of systemd, created by someone who has forgotten all the lessons of the immediate past. And thus, Unix is doomed to be endlessly and poorly reimplemented by people who do not understand it.
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You argue that positioning is antiquated and stupid because data must be positioned in the correct column. That is not the fault of the idea of positioning, that is the fault of the way ASCII does positioning.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is, and the problem is not unique to the ASCII character set. There's literally no character set that has the feature you want, so it's not a matter of switching sets.
One simple idea to fix the issue that so upsets you is to repurpose 2 of the currently unused and useless ASCII control characters to mean "indent++" and "indent--". Those characters would be analogous to parentheses.
That would be stupid. We already have parentheses, and they work just fine.
Markup languages demonstrate more sophisticated ways to position text: metadata. I don't know about you, but I am perfectly happy with the default way browsers display HTML, in "presentation mode", without the tags being visible.
Thank you for just completely fucking torpedoing your own argument: HTML is another language which works in an intelligent fashion. You can lose all the carriage returns and all the indents from HTML and it still displays correctly.
Alternate Analysis (Score:2)
June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited [programming language] tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations.
People visit Stack Overflow looking for solutions to problems with the language they're using. Python was the most visited language tag, you say? Doesn't that make it the most difficult language to use?
python and fashion (Score:2)
So, nothing to see here, really. It's all fashion. DL and ConvNet frameworks are in the mainstream now, and yay, how many of those favour python? Right. So, why are so many people looking for solutions? Well, because they need informaton on python
It's (Score:2)
Pythons exclusive advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
I guess the "batteries included" philosophy also helps -- include plenty of useful libraries in the base install. This helps maintain the idea that there's a standard way of doing things, and I believe it affects those who write/maintain external libraries too.
On the obligatory whitespace issue, I'm worried that it is a problem for large-scale projects with many people on different platforms -- it's happened to me with only a handful of contribut
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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.
Except for Python itself? With the painful object system redesign, various deprecations and such?
Re: Pythons exclusive advantages (Score:3)
If Python is for people who want to do things right the first time, why Python 2, much less Python 3?
2.7 or 3+ ? (Score:2)
Just saying.
fold growth (Score:2)
and has grown by 2.5-fold in that time
No, it hasn't. Fold change represents doubling. 2.5-fold is roughly 5.6 times as much as the original value. Python has seen 2.5 times as much traffic, not 2.5-fold as much traffic.
2.7 vs 3.x has seriously damaged it (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: Python was first released in 1991 (Score:5, Funny)
Man, I heard prisons were tough, but Python, really? Doesn't that violate U.N. human rights accord?
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Yeah man. Python is real gangsta [youtu.be]
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I have a buddy in the big house who carved a few tabs out of an old mattress. That's how he gets by.
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That cannot be compatible with the 8th.
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Whitespace is the equivalent of silence, so it's compatible with the 5th.
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What do you mean? EAX or EDX?
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Last time I tried to program in python, it just tried to strangle me. I learned my lesson and only program in white mouse now.
It's strange, though. Sometimes I get the feeling the mice are just staring at me and analyze everything I do. I better get a towel and a bag of peanuts.
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Agreed. PHP is by far the fastest growing language in terms of new users.
WordPress.
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The number of new PHP users who are publishing new Wordpress plugins and themes each month is astounding. In an afternoon you could learn enough MySQL to use the C-Panel tools to query your Wordpress database about that post about that spotted dog that somebody did sometime last year, or you could spend only $4.95US right this minute to get a plugin written by some high school kid as his first PHP project that would do the work for you! Such a deal! It will even find all the posts about orange cats!
Wordpre
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Only the cut-n-paste crowd will use cut-n-paste resources.
Real Programmers do not.
Real programmers re-use code. Real programmers see if there are more (elegant) solutions to a problem. Real programmers seek to save time. Real programmers write efficient code.
Only beginners will try to re-invent every wheel by themselves and bang their head against the wall for a week or two on a problem, trivial or not, that already has been solved a zillion times before, where a simple google query would enlighten them but their vein stops them from doing so.
Real programmers know how to use and spend th
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So true. However, I'm continually amazed at the number of projects written in C which still manage to break their APIs on a regular basis. In the final analysis it's not a language thing, it's a crappy developer thing.
Re: Pits and valleys (Score:2)
As the saying goes, "move fast and break things", but it should also tell you to expect your end users to find another tool when you break their stuff.
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This may just be the VB6 and VBA die-hards that didnt want to do VB.NET finally settling on an alternative. To be fair, probably the most used language ever is still VBA -- its very hard to over-estimate the number of lines of VBA code written within the cubicles of white collar businesses, where every junior accountant will easily have written several thousand lines of it per year.