[spenrose]

I forgot two, er, three:

9. Python got lucky that its inevitable screwups (Python3) didn’t quite kill it.

10. Swift and Kotlin both define programming as serving the compiler (specifically LLVM) rather than serving the coder’s problem. (I haven’t discussed Rust so far since it isn’t attempting to compete with 98% of Python use cases, but if you squint you can see it as going one step further than Swift and Kotlin and in effect forcing the coder to be a sort of human compiler who thinks in types and memory management. This is not a criticism of Rust, BTW.)

0. And behind all of this is Moore’s Law and the demographic explosion of programmers. Python was an implicit, perhaps unconscious bet that if you served people thoughtfully, the tradeoffs with serving the needs of contemporary silicon wouldn’t matter as much.

[spenrose]

I can't stop thinking about this. WRT Perl specifically, it’s fascinating how the two competitors adopted Unix shell patterns. Python is handicapped to this day by not automagically snarfing up environment variables, etc. But Perl leaned hard into TECO-style gibberish and the meta-syntax that is regular expressions, confronting beginners with arbitrary complexity. It feels like Wall embraced the system administrator side of coding — the side that has an enormous capacity for tracking corner cases and managing impedance mismatches. Wall was trained, perhaps not coincidentally, as a linguist, a field where continent facts really matter. Guido, on the other hand, was an accomplished mathematician. (This is the Dwarf / Elf distinction from Cryptonomicon.)

[eesmith]

Guido van Rossum was not an accomplished mathematician. He has a master's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, and got a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, but the former is because that's where CS was taught, and the latter because he was a smart high school student.

As he described it:

"But after that first year [of college], it turned out that the real math I wasn’t particularly good at. And I think there were some great teachers at that university and some super cool topics being taught. And I couldn’t keep up. I remember something about a particular form of group theory. And I knew—and a few other students who were like, “Oh, you’ve got to go do graph theory, or group theory.” And I was like—it went way too fast. And I suddenly realized I didn’t have the skills to keep up with those topics. But in the meantime, starting almost from my first month I entered the math department, I had been learning to program because they had I think one of the first-year undergraduate courses was programming in Pascal."

Quoting from 'Oral History of Guido van Rossum', https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273871...

[qcnguy]

Kotlin didn't target LLVM at all when it was designed, that feature came much later. The primary target for Kotlin is and always was the JVM. And Kotlin was designed with usability in mind from day one, that was the justification for it. Weird to say Kotlin define programming as serving the compiler. The compiler bends over backwards to serve the user.

[spenrose]

Thank you for the correction

[bb88]

Rust isn't so much "competing" as it is "complimentary" to python. This is very much how python was billed originally as a scripting language for "C" in it's early days.

The slow parts of your python program can be rewritten in rust or C, your choice. So refreshing.

[ethbr1]

To me, this was one of the greatest strengths of early Python: humility.

It didn't try to be everything (high performing, compile-time static typing) to everyone (novice, intermediate, expert, academic).

It instead made it easy to solve critical needs (e.g. highest performance hot code) by interoperating with an existing solution that did them well.