Maybe it's me but I don't get it. I get the meme, but please explain to me why python is considered so much easier than other languages.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is interpreted and the toolkit that it attracts, not the language itself. Having something that's interpreted and as someone normalize grammar, that's the attraction to python. The look of the language is much more forced as well. (No K&R versus ANSI debates)
If Perl wasn't so junky/hacky, perl would still be a major language and probably a lot faster. I like Perl a lot by the way so I'm kind of beating up my own language of choice.
Python originally wasn't a typed language. You didn't have to declare variables, you could just use them, and that got a lot of squinting out of the way for people who just wanted to do things. And it had lists, which were a complicated object masquerading as a simple one. And you didn't need functions, not even main(), so you could write a file that acted as a script but was cleaner than all the scripted languages, which were hamstringed by a long history of being slowly evolved from commands typed into a shell prompt.
There was no compiling and linking, and there was a lot of complex stuff built in so there was very little including.
Now, though, Python is pretty complex itself, you have to include a lot, and often you're compiling because you're using it for something serious and it needs to be performant, and versioning can easily bite you in the ass.
Perl was the OG alternative that filled exactly the slot between compiled and shell-scripted programming that Python now owns, but it had a habit of being arcane, with even more syntactic conjuring than Python now does. And it was fast as fuck. If it was as easy to pick up as Python was originally it probably would have kept Python at bay. I think Larry was more controlling than Guido, too, on top of open source not being as mature a community, so it didn't evolve nearly as fast.
Python originally wasn't a typed language. You didn't have to declare variables, you could just use them,
Perhaps not so ironically, this is what makes Python unsuitable for large projects. I’d rather work on large C++ codebase than large Python codebase. (Yes, I know Python has type hints, but once you start using dependencies, you discover how much of a mess type hints are).
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u/ubd12 2d ago
Maybe it's me but I don't get it. I get the meme, but please explain to me why python is considered so much easier than other languages.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is interpreted and the toolkit that it attracts, not the language itself. Having something that's interpreted and as someone normalize grammar, that's the attraction to python. The look of the language is much more forced as well. (No K&R versus ANSI debates)
If Perl wasn't so junky/hacky, perl would still be a major language and probably a lot faster. I like Perl a lot by the way so I'm kind of beating up my own language of choice.