SQL, Postgres, Pandas, Polars, Airflow, Duckdb, and whatever else shiny object along the way which distracts me from actually doing something productive towards my goals.
No thanks. Paper for life and i've built one of these before and used it for a couple of years before going back to the superior notebook in gym bag option.
My gut feeling is that it succeeded due to escaping scrutiny. I had heard enough critiques of the language from CL folks but the rest of the world was just happy to get a nicer Perl that could be used to glue together C code into useful apps and scripts.
With respect, lispers are probably not the best people to ask how to make a widely adopted language.
Regardless, you’re regurgitating exactly what I said. Your gut is that Python was just a slightly better replacement for Perl. This is at best one dimension. If you can’t broaden your perspective, then this thread full of examples and arguments for why Python became popular will be lost on you.
If you’re so confident in your assessment, why did you bother to ask?
> My gut feeling is that it succeeded due to escaping scrutiny.
Basically every languages mostly escapes scrutiny except from very niche corners (usually people deeply committed to other languages that aren't actually considering alternatives, but criticizing everything that isn't their preferred language for not being their preferred language) until it succeeds, because there are enough of them that basically no one cares to put the time into scrutinizing them until they achieve a critical mass.
That's not why Python succeeded against other languages.
> My gut feeling is that it succeeded due to escaping scrutiny.
You keep saying it, but from 2000-2010, what scrutiny did it escape, exactly?
Are you saying when universities dropped Java/C++ for the introductory course and replaced it with Python, they simply threw dice to pick the language?
Are you saying all the Perl programmers who kept saying "Python will never have the power of CPAN" didn't exist?
Are you saying Eric Raymond never wrote an essay on the virtues of Python?
Perl had the batteries and it had CPAN. Python borrowed the best bits of Perl and enjoyed a reputation which overlooked its many flaws. If it had been scrutinized as much as Perl, we'd have realized it was just as bad but in different ways.
This makes no sense.. Python _was_ heavily scrutinized when it was introduced - the whole "Perl vs Python" comparison was pretty popular for a while, with either of those being declared winner, depending on the author.
If there is really a killer argument for Perl over Python that was overlooked in all those years, why don't you say that argument, or even better, write a blog post explaining why Perl is better than Python? Then we could discuss that instead of nebulous "different ways"/
Perl had charm, it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it. It still remains a beautiful language that I regret not learning due to having a superior taste. Python had none of it. I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort. The only argument you can make is boring is better imho.
Perl hacker who tried to switch to Ruby before adopting Python here:
Of _course_ boring is better. How could it not be? If you are trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want to be thinking about is the language itself.
The language you adopt to code up a solution should force you to think clearly, but no more than that. Executable pseudocode is as close to an ideal state as you can get for a high-level language.
Perl, meanwhile, was filled with multiple ways to do things -- famously and absurdly thought of as a virtue -- reveled in side effects, and did so much implicit work with variables and flow that perl was often unreadable by anybody else, including the you of three months from now.
"Python did everything other scripting languages did, but in a cleaner and more comprehensible way" tells you most of what you need to know about Python's victory, but the death blow was delivered by the perl community's love of complexity, which led to the disaster that was Raku.
By the turn of the century, it was clear that python 3 was a better plan for the future than perl 6.
> it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it
Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked.
Lisp/Scheme are also beautiful to those who 'get' it.
> I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort.
Plenty of people have already told you. 95% of programmers do programming to get the job done. The linguistics grad student I knew 20 years ago did his work in Python because it was easy (he had no programming background). He would have simply changed his thesis topic if Python didn't exist. He would not have learned Perl.
> Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked.
It’s really not the crux of the issue though. “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not. This is certainly not the only reason that Python became so successful.
Tangentially, in my experience Perl was great for one liners and small glue projects. I never saw significant, valuable works of code built in Perl even when I worked at a company (Yahoo) that widely used Perl. I am convinced that much of Perl’s beauty is in its cleverness and’s not in its utility for large projects.
> “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not.
Dial the clock back to 2002, and this statement is not true. Perl became popular not because of its beauty, but because of it being extremely effective glue. It was a language to get stuff done while writing little code.
Did you seriously start this thread just to ask people to confirm your bias?
In that case, yes. Perl is beautiful. Python sucks and only succeeded because idiot developers couldn’t see the beauty of Perl. Python is poorly suited at every job except stealing potential Perl devs.
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