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from the java-is-in-the-lead-because-of-the-caffine dept.
Think of it as a map of the rapidly changing world of computer software.
On Wednesday, GitHub published a graph tracking the popularity of various programming languages on its eponymous Internet service, a tool that lets anyone store, edit, and collaborate on software code. In recent years, GitHub.com has become the primary means of housing open source software—code that's freely available to the world at large; an increasing number of businesses are using the service for private code, as well. A look at how the languages that predominate on GitHub have changed over time is a look at how the software game is evolving.
In particular, the graph reveals just how much open source has grown in recent years. It shows that even technologies that grew up in the years before the recent open source boom are thriving in this new world order—that open source has spread well beyond the tools and the companies typically associated with the movement. Providing a quicker, cheaper, and more comprehensive way of building software, open source is now mainstream. And the mainstream is now open source.
Hmm, Perl has been declining...
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:14PM
I can't remember the last script I looked at on Ubuntu that was Perl. It's all python now.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Francis on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:49PM
And we're all worse off for it. I'm sure it works out fine until the first time when you set things up incorrectly and lose your white space.
Python is OK if you haven't ever used a proper language, but defaulting to white space as delimiters just shows how little the people designing it know about people. In sane languages, I can look for the delimiter easily. If for some reason I want to squash something onto one long line or stretch it out over several, I have that option without having to do anything other than just type it.
I also remember from helping people with their Python that the errors are rather ridiculous at times. Trying to find out which bit of code was supposed to be indented or not, isn't terribly fun.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:03PM
I can't help but disagree. I've been a python developer in the past, and that's not an accurate portrayal of the biggest problems you'll face.
#1. Dependency resolution can be really awful to debug. This is balanced by the fact that pypi eggs have all the tools to get the right dependencies out of the box.
#2. There's essentially no such thing as a compile-time error. You have to get code to load-to-execute before discovering syntax errors. There's probably tools available to make this easier, but I don't know what they are.
#3. Duck-typing can get really problematic. Enforceable interfaces really ought to be an available feature.
The whitespace is a non-issue after your first week. It's intuitive, natural, and actually harder to mess up than curly braces sometimes are.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:59PM
White space in this usage is neither natural nor intuitive. And it was one of the most common things that I saw students screwing up. What's worse is that because it's white space, you don't see it. And if it ever gets messed up, you pretty much have to start over. It also means that when you do learn another language you have to learn how to do it anyways, so you haven't really gained anything like that.
The parentheses, braces and brackets that you see in other languages make a whole lot more sense. You're used to seeing them as pairs with something in the middle. The main thing to learn is what is and isn't allowed inside of them. And Python doesn't even really solve that problem as they do still show up.
I never said there weren't other problems with it. But, code that's generally unreadable without knowing the language is a really, really bad thing. While we're at it, the complete lack of typing ensures that it's completely worthless as a beginner language. Typing is something that you can dispense with when and if your skills grow to the point where you don't need the safety net. But, at that point, you should know what you're doing anyways.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by ikanreed on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:00PM
This sounds like something who's never tried programming in python would say.
Start over because of a formatting issue? Really? The fuck?
(Score: 1) by terryk30 on Sunday August 23 2015, @01:41PM
If for some reason I want to squash something onto one long line or stretch it out over several, I have that option without having to do anything other than just type it.
A habit I'd gotten into with other languages is to put experimental blocks, snippets or debugging statements at col 0. I at least personally find doing this very readable (and thus effective), and have missed being able to do so in Python.