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Comment by mitchi | Hacker News Reader

Guido van Rosseum left Google a while ago because he was annoyed they weren't using Python enough! Python is a nice language but I don't think it's the language of the decade. The langage of the decade is something that has been used from 2000 to 2012 a lot in entreprise and by individuals. Give that price to PHP for all it's worth. PHP was the language for the web for a very long time.... It was used to create facebook. It was a lot more influential than Python. Ask 50 persons in the street if they know what PHP is, then ask them if they know what Python is. I guarantee you that more people know of PHP.

Predicting what will be the next language of the decade is more interesting. My bet is on Javascript for now.

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I like Python (and Ruby) a ton, but they may find themselves legacy-stamped if they don't develop a good concurrency story quite soon.

No big deal to be ~50 times slower than native code in a single-thread, single-processor use case, but for a well-parallelizable problem on a multicore machine you end up being several multiples of ~50 times slower.

Google just gave up on trying to optimize Python (see Unladen Swallow project) and told the engineers to move on to something useful. I am not sure if the interanls are just to messed up too make it work or if resistance and denial on the part of "B"DFLs and the community is too strong.

But when javascript - JAVASCRIPT! - has a better server-side concurrecy pitch than your language, it is in big trouble

Interesting story. Do you know they moved on to what? Java?

Python is still used alongside C++ and Java (and some Go) but primarily for prototyping and small utility scripts. A Google engineer explains:

"Well, simple common sense is going to limit Python's applicability when operating at Google's scale: it's not as fast as Java or C++, threading sucks, memory usage is higher, etc. One of the design constraints we face when designing any new system is, "what happens when the load goes up by 10x or 100x? What happens if the whole planet thinks your new service is awesome?" Any technology that makes satisfying that constraint harder -- and I think Python falls into this category -- should be discouraged if it doesn't have a very strong case made in its favor on other merits."

And note this was before the failure of Unladen Swallow, before van Rossum's departure.

Python is the only line in this graph with a steady upward slope. I think it's fair to say it's the language of the decade if you're not looking at market share, but growth.

My vote goes to JavaScript. Yes, PHP has grown a lot in the last 10 years, but it hasn't made a big difference. Faster and more complete JavaScript runtimes have actually changed the applications we use. Some things would simply not be possible without JavaScript.

php is still the easiest thing to deploy on a server. unless you get loads of ecommerce cms or blog engines in node i wouldnt bet on it. on client there is not much choice anyway.

I don't agree that PHP is that easy to deploy properly. I think it has that reputation only because most people using PHP never actually have to set up and configure a PHP server.

But my point is about the client side. We don't have much of a choice between client side languages, but we do have a choice about how much we do on the client in the first place. That equation has changed quite dramatically over the past decade thanks to new JavaScript runtimes.

> most people using PHP never actually have to set up and configure a PHP server.

Most people using node just use a PAAS too.

That's a tautology.

[Edit] Or did you mean to say that most people use node on a PAAS? In that case it's not a tautology, but I don't think that most people do, and I didn't say node was easy to set up.

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