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Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

Given that there are literally thousands of huge projects using Python at massive scale and hundreds of kLOC, it's clearly not essential.

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"50 million cigarette smokers can't be wrong!"

An appeal to popularity is not really a logical fallacy if someone is arguing that something is (effectively) unpopular.

Depends if you define popular by most used or most liked.

Most used: everyone pays taxes. Paying taxes is popular!

A more practical example is javascript. I write some javascript, not because I like it (I hate it), but because that's the only way to make things happen in a browser. Javascript is popular. Does it mean it is liked / a good language?

If the statement is "there are no cigarette smokers", then "there are 50 million" is a reasonable counterpoint.

Code written in a statically typed language requires less testing. How is that not essential?

Code written in dynamically typed language requires less code, which often means less surface area for failure, and less tests.

> often means

No it does not, neither in theory nor in practice. Also, "less code" depends primarily on the language structure and not on whether the language is dynamically typed or not. (Haskell, for example, is more terse than Python.)

>No it does not, neither in theory nor in practice.

I've yet to come across something that was fewer loc in C++/java than in python.

That said, this is true even if I use pytype.

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