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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

Same. I’ll get downvoted for saying this but I find that it is a very overrated language that is popular mostly because of its dominance in fields that are currently in the vogue, i.e. ML/AI.

(I know Django is a thing, but that has always been in the shadow of Rails, and rightly so.)

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In 2005 I had to choose to invest in learning either Ruby or Python as a primary language for writing a fairly complex piece of technical software.

I looked into Ruby and it struck me as being a truly aesthetically pleasing language, and since it espoused the "principle of least surprise" -- with caveats, naturally -- most Ruby code tended to be straightforward to read.

Python on the other hand, while clean -- I came from Perl -- had a fair bit of ugliness like the "self" argument in class methods, and the "dunders" in dunder methods (__init__). That said, the Python ecosystem, especially in the numerical computation space, was far ahead of Ruby's at the time, so I chose Python. It worked out really well and allowed me to accomplish what I needed to. To this day I have no regrets choosing Python.

Compared to many languages (like Haskell etc.) Python's design isn't the most aesthetically pleasing or orthogonal or clean. But being a Dutch design, at least initially, it was very pragmatic. And Python is by no means ugly on an absolute scale, on the contrary. It’s just not as beautiful as some others.

Python's main advantage is the energy behind it: to this day there are no converged alternatives to Numpy or Pandas on Ruby.

I can't help but wonder that if in an alternate universe/timeline, Travis Oliphant, Pearu Peterson, Wes McKinney and others happened to have encountered Ruby first, we might have a different de facto language for scientific computing and data science.

I don't understand why people bashing self argument. It's part of best design decisions in python. Methods in languages such Java or JavaScript always have hidden argument called 'this'. In js this actually become messy duo to binding of this. In python you can easily find this method is bind to instance of class aka 'self'. It's not always self, It could be cls for classmethods or nothing for static methods.

Most languages have an implicit “this”/“self” which works well. This makes it easy to convert functions to class methods and vice versa without using any editor refactoring features. It also makes it easier to refactor (no need to search and replace every reference to foo within an object to self.foo —- the only time this might be iffy is if there’s a global function foo, but in practice it’s not onerous to handle)

Also beginners don’t have to mentally blot out in their heads the self argument when calling a method (“you mean self isn’t the first argument?”). Debug messages are also more consistent (“the debug message says my method needs 1 argument. Isn’t self right there?”)

I accept Python’s explicit self for what it is (Python’s philosophy prefers explicit over implicit), and don’t have trouble with it but aesthetically it deviates from most OOP languages out there. It’s a valid choice for practical reasons but I would also say that an implicit “this” is an equally valid choice for aesthetic reasons.

Here’s a survey of this/self choices: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_(computer_programming)

Python is like a dutch windmill and Ruby is like a japanese origami. Python is robust and Ruby is elegant.

No downvotes, but I think it's popular because it's an extremely well-designed language. It has a ton of warts - not even to mention the 2.x -> 3.x kerfuffle - but in general it is a thoughtfully designed language.

I don't see why anyone should be downvoted for expressing his or her own consclusions that draw on personal and practical experience of using both languages. The comment is not inflamatory and it merely reflects your own experience. Perfecly valid.

I can’t speak about here, but on Reddit, people use the voting for “like/agree” or “dislike/disagree”.

At some point I read somewhere that the whole point of upvote and downvote on Reddit was for “contributed to conversation” (upvote) or doesn’t (downvote).

That, to me, makes sense.

Disagreeing is part of what promotes good, challenging discussions. It also buffers us from external influences controlling the crowd of “agree’ers”. By promoting and encouraging differences of opinion or view, we make it harder for someone to come in and sway the crowd.

I think I'm starting to get the gist of it now. Thanks. I should have upwoted than, because I felt the sentiment to be valid in the context of the post and the conversation thread.

unfortunately some people feel that saying something they don't agree with isn't contributing to the discussion and are downvoting anyways. i upvote comments that i see unfairly downvoted.

btw, our little subthread here is off topic and may be downvoted for that. (rightfully as we aren't contributing to the actual topic)

A lot of Python's popularity, in my experience, is from the simple fact that it came loaded on many mainstream Linux distros by default. Many people picked it up simply because it was there, and it became the de-facto systems tooling language for a while.

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