was python ever irrelevant?
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.
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.
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.
subprocess.Popen(["bash one-liner"], stdout=PIPE, stderr-PIPE, text=True)
I use perl, but everyone hates me and would rather rewrite my little scripts in python than bother changing a single line
Depends entirely what tests you’re automating. Java codebase? Probably Java tests too. Anything web? Tests will be JS too, etc.
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…
Maybe when 3.0 was new and created all sorts of incompatibilities with 2.x
Yesterday I would have argued that with the rails framework Ruby is a great way to rapidly develop a scalable application. Today I started having an intermittent failure in one of my API instances and when searching about it the only thing I could find was one obscure blogpost that boiled down to “yeah sometimes Ruby Ave active record just screws up the character set off a string” exact same string, different results. Excuse me Ruby? How the fuck can you sometimes screw up a character set? There should be no sometimes to any thing here.
Mastodon is written in Ruby. Nowhere near as big as Facebook or the ML field, but hey, it’s important to a couple of us at least :)
It probably wasn’t a big deal when it was a niche project until Twitter imploded. Then all the public instances got overloaded with new users and the limits became obvious.
A better design is Lemmy which is written in Rust so it has far more scalability. It’s compiled and because it’s tokio / actix based, it can also do a lot more stuff asynchronously so it’s not spawning thousands of threads to cope with concurrent requests.
@pkill Yeah seems that way, judging by their scaling up documentation: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/scaling/
Although hey, it all depends on a whole bunch of stuff written in super optimised (and kinda scary) C !
Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: !programming@programming.dev
As a Rails engineer with 14 years experience, I can say the place that should be in the 3rd panel is Shopify. They employ so many ruby and rails core committers and directly fund a good many rails gems, and ruby community infrastructure it’s insane. They’re also directly funding the development of things like the YJIT and speed enhancements to MRI itself.
Then there’s all the other places I know or worked at built on Ruby where my other long tenured ruby friends work.
- Gusto
- Airbnb
- Clearbit
- Stripe
- Github
- Gitlab
- Bold Penguin
Ruby was recommended to me by my comparative programming languages professor. I haven’t picked it up, but there were memes that this professor was so good at programming he was secretly built by the university in C++ to teach students how to write better code.
One of the most known programming tool is built on Ruby, Github.
And it’s a pile of shit.
git is great. GitHub blows chunks. The only reason it’s still big is that it sucks less than any other single platform.
@SpaceNoodle I’ll always be sad how GitHub helped popularise centralised workflows. Such an amazing opportunity for a big cultural shift, but it didn’t go anyway as far as it could have.
Git owes a lot of its popularity to github. Without it, there’s a good chance that mercurial would have taken over. In addition, the centralized workflow was what made both git and github popular. It simplified git usage enough to let a lot of novices get started.
I’m in no way a fan of centralization that github represents. But I think a decentralized workflow using git was a lost opportunity. People complain a lot about the git-email workflow. But I see no reason why it couldn’t have become as easy as using github if the effort spent on github was spent on git-email tools and user experience.
