Python's popularity statistics

[Hrvoje Nezic]

> I said the same thing elsewhere in this thread. I cited Perl for its,
well,
> plain terrible design (I wasn't specific, though---mainly, it's a good old
> syntax problem). I wouldn't imply popularity=quality, ever. Look at pop
music
> compared to Chopin,Bach, Bartok and friends, for example. (Yes-I'm a
classical
> music snob). And I would say more often than not it indicates lack of
quality
> when something's popular. But we have to be careful.
>
> Python is that rare instance of a language which deserves popularity (it's
the
> Beatles of programming languages).
>
> For me though, programming language popularity does say something of its
> usefulness and power, if not of its difficulty.

I don't think so. I think in many cases "big players" (M$, Sun, etc.) are
pushing
some languages, and this is why they are so popular. If C# was invented not
by Microsoft, but by someone who is not a big player, I don't think it would
achieve popularity it has.

Availability of libraries and tools is just a consequence of popularity, but
of
course, it has an effect of positive feedback to further rise of popularity.

I don't think that C or C++ are powerful languages, especially when compared
with others. Of course, the question is what we mean by this. In my view,
real object-oriented languages are powerful, but C++ is not one of them.

When I mentioned languages that are not popular, while they deserve it,
I meant languages like Eiffel. Eiffel beats its competitors, like C++, Java,
C#, Smalltalk and others in many respects. It is a state-of-the-art
object-oriented programming language. It has genericity, design-by-contract
(assertions: preconditions, postconditions, invariants), it has genericity
(constrained and unconstrained), it has multiple inheritance, carefully
designed and implemented, it has elegant and clear syntax, it is *pure*
object-oriented language, which means it has consistent and uniform
treatment of all types, basic and others, and it is very efficient.
All these characteristics means that it is very powerful.
Yet it is not popular.

I think that languages with static typing and dynamic typing belong to
different categories. I wouldn't use Python or any language
with dynamic typing for really serious and critical tasks,
like writing software for the rocket Ariane, or for banks,
where on launching the rocket you could get run-time errors
which would never pass compile phase of languages with static typing.