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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Python sits firmly in top place in the newest annual ranking of popular programming languages by IEEE Spectrum.
The ranking and others like it are meant to help developers understand the popularity of languages in a world where no one really knows what programmers are using on their laptops.
IEEE Spectrum has placed Python in first spot since 2017, and last year it was just ahead of C++. The top language is given a score of 100, and all languages with lower scores are scaled in relation to it. C++ last year scored 99.7, followed by Java at 97.5, and C with 96.7.
Today, in the IEEE Spectrum's sixth annual ranking, Python's 100 is a long way ahead of runner-up Java's 96.3 score, while C is in third place with 94.4. C++ has slipped to fourth with 87.5, while in fifth is specialist statistical computing language R with a score of 81.5.
The magazine for engineering members of IEEE, the world's biggest engineering and applied-science organization, attributes Python's popularity to the vast number of specialized libraries it has, especially for developers building artificial-intelligence applications.
[...] They go on to note that Facebook, which was originally built with PHP, launched its alternative to PHP, Hack, in 2014 and since then JavaScript, TypeScript and Python have become the most popular languages for web development.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @06:01PM (1 child)
You may be right.
From my personal experience, in many ways, Python is the new Perl.
It attracts dabblers who say their language doesn't need all the features of other languages, then they find out they really do, so then they add them over the years as half-assed bolt-ons that don't integrate with the rest of the language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @06:59PM
I don't know about that, Python is being aggressively pushed around here to unsuspecting CS students that don't know any better. We do it because the local 4 year school decided to use it.
There's a ton of rationalizations that go into it, but considering that the next language we teach is Java, I don't see much benefit in teaching such idiosyncratic syntax only to jump to Java. At least with Javascript, there had been a lot of Java stolen that allowed for a nicer transition.
The whitespace thing just makes it worse.