this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 205 points 8 months ago (5 children)

was python ever irrelevant?

[–] [email protected] 111 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nope. This cartoon is horseshit.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

Yeah. Look at any dev job listing and it's all "Python, C++, or Java experience preferred"

[–] [email protected] 41 points 8 months ago

Perhaps as the new hotness to web devs, but Python was a mainstay in science way before Django.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For about the first five years of its life, it was eclipsed by Perl. That's about it. I don't think anything will ever unseat Python as too many people's first and last language.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Surely not in the immediate future, but there will surely be a day when Python dies. Remember that BASIC filled that role for far too long.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (3 children)

BASIC was meant as a teaching language. Python is a real language that's simple enough to be a teaching language. It also runs the same dialect on every machine, which BASIC never did.

Being the second best language at everything, it gets used for everything because people don't want to learn the first best in any given niche. Python isn't the best choice for numeric applications, but with NumPy, it's adequate, so why bother learning R? Even if you knew R already, you're going to run into a lot of Python code for that domain from other people. You'll be swimming against the current, and why bother?

Python will die when the sun does.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You have absolutely no idea how much business code has been written in VB.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Or COBOL.

No language truly dies, while Capitalism exists.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I do know, but that's off to the side of BASIC in general. In fact, VB syntax is barely recognizable as BASIC.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Python is one of my primary languages (the other one being Rust). But it honestly isn't the easiest language to teach - I'm saying this from experience. There are so many concepts at play - name binding, iterators, generators, exception chains, context managers, decorators, ... . I could go on and on. Teaching becomes hard because any basic question could become a journey into the rabbit hole of python semantics.

Python is, however, a good first language for self learners. (Note: teaching vs learning). Python behaves intuitively. It's designed in such a way that if you guess something about the language, you'll probably be right.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

Being the ~~second~~ tenth best language at everything

FTFY

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Python is the language of choice for most test automation

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

If I can't do it as a Bash one-liner, I'm using Python

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

subprocess.Popen(["bash one-liner"], stdout=PIPE, stderr-PIPE, text=True)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)
["bash", "one-liner"]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I use perl, but everyone hates me and would rather rewrite my little scripts in python than bother changing a single line

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You're right, everyone hates you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The good news is that you can stop using Perl at any time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For quick data parsing you'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands im afraid

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That could be arranged. I could bash you over the head with a python.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

It's a kind offer, but my head is far too hard

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

Grug use go because it easier, faster, and compiles to share with friends of Grug

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Depends entirely what tests you're automating. Java codebase? Probably Java tests too. Anything web? Tests will be JS too, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Web testing is also done in python. Selenium has support in all major Python test frameworks. I've done SE-only tests in Robot, hybrid SE/Python using BDD with Behave, etc.

Unless I'm testing a language-specific API, I'm probably going to use Python...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm guessing that's because you're a python developer though. If you're a frontend developer who knows JS then why wouldn't you use that for your tests? (Apart from the fact that JS is horrible, but you've already accepted that suffering by becoming a web dev)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I'm a test automation developer, I'm not necessarily bound by the platform that the application is written in unless I'm writing white-box tests.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Maybe when 3.0 was new and created all sorts of incompatibilities with 2.x

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

Nah, Python 2.7 got way more support than it ever deserved because people just refused to switch to 3. Hell, people were starting new python projects on 2 after 3 came out.