> threatening to start a new trade war if the EU doesn't permit their murdermobiles on the European roads
The strange part is that those car can be sold in the EU markets already. They just have to comply with the same pollution and safety standards as other cars. What would justify an exception?
> mostly because it's the scripting language of choice for PyTorch and AI-adjacent libraries/tooling/frameworks
I would politely disagree. Torch started in Lua, and switched to Python because of its already soaring popularity. Whatever drove Python's growth predates modern AI frameworks
Python was already big for scientists back in 2010. I remember working on Python tooling at the time, and DS/ML was one of our single largest user groups. It was already popular enough to have an IDE specifically for scientific Python use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyder_(software).
As far as I could tell, it had to do with two things. First, Python is notoriously dynamic and extensible, making it possible to implement "sloppy" syntax like advanced slicing or dataframes. But also, those guys had lots of pre-existing C and Fortran code, and Python had one of the easiest extensibility APIs to wrap it as high-level packages. And with IPython, you had a nice REPL with graphing to use all that from, and then of course notebooks happened.
Yeah, I can see that. At the time of the talk Feldman claims Python is a slow-and-steady language. It definitely did get a lot of support from the scientific/engineering community for a long time. I spent a good part of my career with Python from about 2006-2016.
It had boosts from Django... but it never had Rails' level of popularity. You kinda have to be first-to-market and that good to get the "killer app" effect.
It's also been integrated as the scripting language for several popular software pacakges (Blender comes to mind).
Machine learning and now... "AI"; seems to be a market cornered by Python quite a bit.
I had already learned Basic, C++, Java, and C#. I wanted to add a dynamic scripting language that was cross-platform under my belt.
A lot of my peers were in the same boat.
Python seemed at the time, to be the only general purpose scripting language that was easy to use on multiple platforms.
I had heard bad things about Perl being write only, and Ruby being tough to deploy, I also found it hard to read. (Which is a shame they are wonderful languages, though Ruby is dog slow, Python is slow too, but Ruby is worse somehow).
IIRC Google and some other large companies were pushing it as one of their official languages.
Right as Python was rocketing in popularity, Go came out, and I also heard a lot of good things about Clojure (they seemed neck and neck in popularity from my incorrect perspective at the time, lol).
Do you mean the comic was responsible, or the comic explains why Python is popular? It is definitely the ecosystem. As you said its general purpose. It is used for numerical computing and visualisation, web apps, GUIs, sysadmin. Even a reasonably popular DVCS is written in Python.
> my feeling is that I’d still reach for it if my hands are really physically hurting, and I need to keep working. Usually once I reach the point where I’ve got blisters on my fingers I think it’s better to just take a break
I'm dumbfounded, and impressed in an unhealthy way. Do some of you regularly type so much that you develop blisters?
Every day when I look in the mirror, and I don't have this problem.
Then again, by the time I had a touch typing course at age ten using an old typewriter, I already had taken piano lessons for a couple of years. My music teacher was very strict on proper hand positioning, saying that future me would hate him if I didn't learn that right. I stopped taking piano lessons soon after, but I imagine that the skills involved with properly playing the piano transfer quite well to typing.
Yes - I agree. Piano skills definitely make it easier to pick up touch typing.
I learned piano earlier in my life and then learned touch typing (and shameless plug: built https://www.typequicker.com) later on in life and I definitely had a easier time than some of my peers.
I’m curious - what course did you take (might have been a while) ? I’m hoping to built features in TypeQuicker for institutional clients (schools, tutoring agencies, etc) and I’m doing research on what some schools currently use.
Many don’t have any courses at all so it’s a hard sell right now
Ehm.. I'm afraid I don't remember, although I doubt it would be of use to you if I did :). I'm Dutch and this was in the '90s. It was a course organized by the local community center using some Dutch book made for Dutch typewriters (so I actually had to unlearn where the dedicated IJ digraph was when I switched to computers).
Uv's support of inline metadata is super handy. What if the person running the scripts doesn't have uv yet though? For fun I wrote a double shebang script that will handle that too:
https://paulw.tokyo/standalone-python-script-with-uv/
interesting, i have used such lines-cuts-chops "layouting" 20y ago for completely non-spatial context - overlapping timelines of validity of values (1-or-bi-temporal) influencing X, and then calculating the value-in-time of X from combining those time-chops
Skills: international marketing professional (7 years). Decided to specialize further, I obtained a master in globalization, business and development from the University of Sussex. Speak English and Japanese, intermediate in French.
