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Comment by yifanl | Hacker News Reader

Depends on how you measure most popular. I think I saw a post here saying that the most new questions on SO were for python over js now, which might be a good enough proxy?

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I suppose Python is so popular in the ML and data-science spaces now that it makes some sense. I don't know a lot about those spaces, and the little bit I've played with neural networks I've done with Clojure because I'm hipster.

Amazing how much of a pure-functional bubble I live in now. I should probably branch out more.

The university I went to have now switched from Java to Python for introductory computer science. So this type of change may influence this increase in popularity as well.

I remember being a bit baffled that they used Java and not Python as an introductory language. It's a very obvious choice for beginners.

Lol, I remember the first lesson.

    class HelloWorld {
      public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, world");
      }
    }

That was the first piece of code I learned, too. It's a small miracle I somehow still managed to fall in love with programming that semester.

My first language was C++ (which I hate now), then I learned Haskell, and then I went to college and learned Java, and I remember honestly feeling that the "hello world" that they teach must be somewhat of an "academic version" of things; there's no way anyone would write code that verbose that accomplishes that little.

Now I have a job where I do Java about 30-40% of the time, and I've become horrified to learn that the school version of Java is the easy version. Having to create three different files to set up a database connection never ceases to depress me.

A lot of universities are teaching using python now.

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