Python Overtakes JavaScript as Most Popular Language on GitHub

anything else > python > JS

sorry js fans, but python is what an interpreted highlevel language should be

Python’s major pro is its simple, straightforward syntax, which excels at data handling. This has made it popular with novices of all shades […]

For first-timer coders, Python is easier to learn, understand, and adapt than many low-level programming languages […]

Is python being easy to learn actually true? I can see it being easier than low-level programming. But there's other alternatives like C# and Java that certainly seem much better and easier to me. Especially when you consider the ecosystem around only writing code.

Plus, the Python language is a steadfast feature in the desktop Linux software landscape. It’s preinstalled on most Linux distributions, boasts extensive library support, and can be used to fashion very cool (as well as very basic) Qt, GTK, and other toolkit UIs.

It's certainly available, and more readily available on Linux. The whole v2 v3 mess was lackluster. But I guess preinstalled is convenient, and more accessible than installable Java or whatever.

I've never seen JavaScript or Python popularity as evidence or correlating with actual qualities. More with a self-promoting usage. Python was being used in science, then in AI, then AI became popular. To me, it seems like a natural propagation consequence more than simplicity or features over other frameworks and languages.

Is python being easy to learn actually true?

In my experience teaching C to non computer science students It should be. They struggle a lot with variable type and the strict syntax in general, tokenization , etc, but specially ; and {}. They are more visual so I think the forced identification of python helps and they can see to which block a line of code belongs and also it is easy to think one line one statement. When they forgot a semi-colon it is hard to explain that it became one logical line with the next one.
Is python being easy to learn actually true?

I've never found this to be true, I think that's partially because I don't find Python to be very fun to write in, so I don't enjoy it very much, so I don't learn new things about it very quickly.

As for data science using Python, something tells me that this has to do with memory heap capacities. I'm not sure about Python's max memory heap, but Javascript through Node.js seems to have only 512MB. I've been using Node.js to deal with big datasets and my most recent experimentation stumbled across the need of loading 100 million numbers to the RAM: while my PC has a fair amount of physical RAM (12GB) and a great part of it was available, it'll simply error when filling an array. I needed an additional parameter, --max-old-space-size, so Node.js could deal with such amount of data. I didn't try the same task with Python because I'm used to Javascript (yet I'm done some things in Python), but I wonder how much memory can Python hold until an error like "out of memory" happens, because ML models (for example, those hosted and served in HuggingFace) loads training weights with dozens of GBs

eeew (/s)

I have a dislike for both of them. Well, for JavaScript mainly the server-side part. I'm fine with it on web scripting, where it's the only native one.

Snakes, why did it have to be snakes?

Were just waiting on WASM to be able to access the DOM APIs directly, and then all languages will be first class citizens on the web, and then RIP JavaScript.

Is that even a stated goal? I swear we've been waiting for that to exist for the better part of a decade. It would solve so many issues and comes up in every discussion about Javascript, yet the powers that be seem to have zero interest in pushing this forward.
I don't think so - Javascript doesn't have to ship its language runtime so it will always have a size advantage.
- You don't need a language runtime if your program has no runtime, right? A rust or C program is just the program, no runtime.
Delphi will be back, baby.
That would be quite an amazing era to live in ahaha ! We can the start the work as a community to match the JavaScript Ecosystem by providing high quality primitives for developers. For that to happen developer UX has to improve though :) but I think WASM definitely has some future.

However to contrast my previous thoughts, I find it pretty sad that people want to move away from JS when we got thing like Bun & Demo 2.0 hitting their prime!

We got benchmarks, cross-runtime stdlib, better registeries, type safety, enough performance, extendability (with runtime plugins & API). I think were approchaing a TS/JS paradigm that's pretty impressive I must admit.
- Deno looks interesting.
  
  But Bun choosing Zig makes me think their priorities are not my priorities. As of now, you choose Zig (a not-yet-stable language) because you want to learn Zig and make a neat side-project. Those are not my priorities. Zig offers no unique advantages other than neat new syntax.
  
  Deno chose Rust, which, like Zig, is new, but Rust has reached 1.0 and offers a unique advantage with its safety features. I'm not saying anything about the greatness of Rust here, only that Rust does offer unique advantages, and Rust could be chosen because of general priorities.
  
  Bun chose Zig and then worked backwards and formed their priorities around Zig. Deno formed their priorities and their priorities lead them to Rust.
  
  That's how I feel anyway.

Ok after reading the article this is bullshit. It's only because they are counting JavaScript and Typescript separately.

Typescript being that popular is great news onto itself.
- We have different concept about what great news is.
  
  Compiling to an interpreted high level language is crazy. I just refuse to believe we haven't got a better solution to yet.

Every time I open a js file from some project I have to tweak to use on my website, I get a brain aneurysm. that shit should never have been invented. python in the browser is the dream we are not allowed to have.

ps: I am just a hobbyist ! so take it lightly.

Idk, my only experience with python is that any app written in it doesn't fucking work, throwing some esoteric error that has nothing to do with the error at hand and then me needing to look up what unholy specific version I need and manually setting up an environment for it. I dread the day when I'll want to try some random project and yet again the only way to run it will be some shady ass python script.

JS is pure crack and has no right being the backbone of the web, but python is borderline unusable in my experience.
- I avoid anything written in Python. It's not the language at fault it's the ease of entry so you get a lot of low quality software.
Somebody should write a python to javascript transpiler for the web...

(please don't actually do that)
- There's a Python WASM runtime, if you really want to run python in a browser for some reason...
  
  https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-python
- https://pyscript.net/

Thank god, Javascript is a mess.

I’ll still plug Scala for having the beauty of Python, the ecosystem of Java, the correctness of Rust, the concurrency of Go, and the power of Lisp.

I code both typescript and python professionally, and python is almost as much of a mess, just a different kind of mess. The package manager ecosystem is all over the place, nobody is agreeing on a build system, and the type system is still unable to represent fairly simple concepts when it comes to function typing. Also tons of libraries just ignore types altogether. I love it, but as a competitor to JavaScript in the messiness department it's not a good horse.
- I'm going to code in Python for my job soon, do you have links on how TF I should manage dependencies? I can't stand the bloat of virtual environments or Anaconda sorry.
  
  I need to make myself a stack python but I don't want to look at this madness. At least Typescript benefits from a high quality ecosystem of frontend tooling with Vite/React/ESLint/ESBuild and it's getting even better with the new runtimes features :)
  
  I need to learn about:
  
  built-in tools provided by the language (practice on the job and the power of Google & LLMs will help)
  
  ecosystem
  
  good practices
  
  Why is their a build system for an interpreted language ? Do you have bundling concerns like in JS or you somehow compile Python code now?
- They ignore types all together because typing is optional in python.
- the type system is still unable to represent fairly simple concepts when it comes to function typing
  
  what do you mean by this?
- types are always ignored at runtime, they're only useful when developing
- Thank you! I thought I was going nuts when I switched to python and the python versions and package management.
Typescript is far nicer than Python though. Well I will give Python one point: arbitrary precision integers was absolutely the right decision. Dealing with u64s in Typescript is a right pain.

But apart from that it's difficult to see a single point on which Python is clearly better than Typescript:

Static typing. Pyright is great but it's entirely optional and rarely used. Typescript obviously wins here.

Tooling. Deno is fantastic but even if we regress to Node/NPM it's still a million miles better than the absolute dog shit pile of vomit that is Pip & venv. Sorry Python but admit your flaws. uv is a shining beacon of light here but I have little hope that the upstream Python devs will recognise that they need to immediately ditch pip in favour of officially endorsing uv. No. They'll keep it on the sidelines until the uv devs run out of hope and money and give up.

Performance. Well I don't need to say more.

Language sanity. They're pretty on par here I think - both so-so. JavaScript has big warts (the whole prototype system was clearly a dumb idea) but you can easily avoid them, especially with ESLint. But Python has equally but warts that Pylint will tell you about, e.g. having to tediously specify the encoding for every file access.

Libraries & ecosystem. Again I would say there's no much in it. You'd obviously be insane to use Python for anything web related (unless it's for Django which is admittedly decent). On the other hand Python clearly dominates in AI, at least if you don't care about actually deploying anything.
- What is so bad about virtual environments? I found them to be really nice and useful when I developed in Python over about 5-ish years. It was really nice being able to have separate clean environments for installing libraries and executing things.
  
  Granted, I only used Python as a solo developer, so if there are shortcomings that emerge when working with other developers, then I would not be aware of them....
  
  Edit: also, performance is a bit more of a subtle topic. For numerical logic, Python actually is (probably) much better than a lot of its competitors thanks to numpy and numexpr. For conditional logic, I would agree that it's not the best, but when you consider developer velocity, it's a clearly worthwhile tradeoff since frameworks like Django are so popular.
- I write mostly Python for 5 years and uv is indeed the best thing that happened to the Python landscape during this period.
  
  I disagree that typescript is far nicer; even syntax-wise, type annotated Python seems much easier to read, write, and refactor; but I'll give that Python needs to ditch pip and "requirements.txt" for good.
- Language sanity. They’re pretty on par here I think
  
  [1] + [2] "12"
  
  A sane language, you say.
  
  const foo = 'hello' const bar = { foo: 'world'} console.log(bar) // { "foo": "world" }
  
  the absolute dog shit pile of vomit that is Pip & venv
  
  I've worked professionally in python for several years and I don't think it's ever caused a serious problem. Everything's in docker so you don't even use venv.
Scala does look nice. Just a quick syntax view makes me want to give it a whirl when I want an alternative to Python. I used to code in C++, and C#. I use G'MIC (DSL) as my main. Scala seems right up my alley.
The only problem is that it also has the complexity of C++.
- Not the foot-shooting complexity though, just the extra-power complexity

Also some projects are using web assembly to make frontend python frameworks such as this one https://github.com/kkinder/puepy

Edit: wrong project

Thanks, AI.

who’s Al? Albert? Alfresco? Alfred?
- Bundy.
- Probably AI Pacino

This plus Mojo has me feeling better about just wanting to stick to python. I gotta dable in go and rust because not everything is my project (thank God), but I can't wait till performance python syntax is the norm

Yeah I really would love to use Python instead on JavaScript natively for the same use case.

That's what happens when you suck balls at being a programming language. But sure go ahead and program your whatever device in Java or JavaScript. I'm sure it will help something.

What?

Yeesh on both counts.