Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

The methodology involves search hits, Stackoverflow, conference and journal articles.

In all of these Python is artificially over-represented. Search hits and Stackoverflow questions represent beginners who are force fed Python in university or in expensive Python consultancy sessions. Journal articles are full of "AI" topics, which use Python.

Python is not used in any application on my machine apart from OS package managers. Python is used in web back ends, but is replaced by Go. "AI" is the only real stronghold due to inertia and marketing.

Like the TIOBE index, the results of this so called survey are meaningless and of no relevance to the jobs market.

View on HN

Huh. If you hate AI as you sorely do, you will find any excuse to be dismissive.

Besides AI development, Python is used heavily in data processing and data science, also in writing bots of any kind, and as a glue language to do numerous tasks. It is true that it is being replaced by Go in web backends, but it still sees heavy use in that too. Moreover, Python is the only language that many AIs can interactively use in their chat sessions.

Python is used heavily in data science (and a lot of other places) because people who go to university for non software engineering disciplines get taught Python because it's "the easy language that already has libraries for this research we're doing." Those people then go on to write more of these libraries. Their code does amazing things, but very slowly.

There's a good video series called "Programming Paradigms" by Jerry Cain, taken from his class at Stanford. I'm not sure how long ago it was, but it was before whiteboards, when they were still using chalk. He just started including Python that year when it was the up-and-coming thing, as an example of a higher-level language that does a lot of stuff for you. It probably seemed like a breeze for the students after the previous weeks spent on C, assembly, and Lisp, but at least they got some of the fundamentals of how things worked first.

Totally, it's always about trade-offs. It takes a decent amount of time programming to become comfortable choosing the language based on the task rather than tailoring the task to the language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com