Happy birthday, Python, you're 30 years old today: Easy to learn, and the right tool at the right time

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Happy birthday, Python, you're 30 years old today: Easy to learn, and the right tool at the right time

Popular programming language, at the top of its game, still struggles to please everyone

 

February 20, 2021, the 30th anniversary of Python, finds the programming language at the top of its game but not without challenges.

"I do believe that Python just doesn’t have the right priorities these days," said Armin Ronacher, director of engineering at software monitoring biz Sentry and creator of Flask, the popular Python web app framework, in an email interview with The Register.

 

Ronacher, a prolific Python contributor, remains a fan of the language. He credits Python's success to being both easy to learn and having an implementation that was easy to hack. And in its early years, Python didn't have a lot of competitors with those same characteristics, he said.

"The hackability of the language enabled many of the projects that made it successful, such as NumPy and others, which extended the language through extension modules written in C that would have been hard to do with Python alone at the time," he said. "Some of the functionality to enable libraries like NumPy were added right to the language itself to enable these more advanced use cases."

 

Ronacher expressed appreciation for Python's readability, at least initially.

"It’s easy to read, it wasn’t an overly complex language for a long time, and it gives you a lot of access to the internals," he said. "The latter allows you to introspect the runtime without many penalties, which in turn means that it’s an interesting language to build web services on top. When something goes wrong in production you can easily figure out what was happening."

 

He also pointed to the relatively simple runtime, which makes runtime performance more predictable. "While it’s not a very fast language, it compensates for this somewhat because the reference counting semantics often mean that the memory usage is somewhat predictable in production environments," he said.

 

At the same time, Ronacher takes issue with the path Python has taken recently.

"Over the last few years, Python hasn't made the most amazing decisions," he said. "For instance, I’m not a fan of how Unicode was approached. With Python 3, I wish a Unicode model more like Rust would have been approached that just declares strings to be UTF-8 in memory. Python 3 is very wasteful with memory when it comes to Unicode to permit direct indexing into characters, which is not that useful anyways with modern Unicode."

 

He also took issue with the focus of Python's core developers.

"Many features are landing that are making the language much more complex to learn, such as the async IO system, the way the typing support works, and the new match statement," he said. "Meanwhile, essential features such as a better packaging story are still absent."

 

The shortcomings of Python's software packaging tools – the software used to set up Python environments and to download, install, and manage libraries – have been an issue for years. It was bad enough that cartoonist Randall Munroe, on April 30, 2018, penned an xkcd comic on the subject.

 

Things have improved somewhat since then. In 2019, the Python Software Foundation awarded the Packaging Working Group $407,000, courtesy of Mozilla and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to renovate the pip package management tool in 2020.

 

Nevertheless, Ronacher said he hopes Python's core developers focus on improving packaging and on adding the ability to load different versions of the same library side by side.

"It’s much more complex to install packages in the Python ecosystem than others and the packaging infrastructure is too disconnected from the core language development," he said.

 

"Whereas Node now comes with npm out of the box and Rust develops the cargo package manager alongside the language, Python still does not consider packaging to be part of language development. As a result, there are countless competing efforts that are all pieced together."

 

"Whereas a Rust programmer can just download the language and use the integrated rustup+cargo tools for everything, Python programmers need to juggle many different tools to accomplish something similar but those tools are not developed in unison," Ronacher explained. "Unlike all other modern languages, Python also can only load one version of a dependency. This means that your entire software project needs to agree on a compatible version, which becomes harder the larger the ecosystem grows and the faster it moves."

 

Even though Python's packaging story still suffers by comparison to Rust's well-regarded Cargo system, the language has never been more popular. Its maintainers must be doing something right.

Who's in control?

Named as a nod to British comedy troupe Monty Python, the language has become the second or third most popular choice, depending on who you ask, for those writing computer code.

 

The language's creator, Guido van Rossum, relinquished his role overseeing the language and his honorary epithet, Benevolent Dictator for Life, in July 2018. This was after a fractious debate over the addition of a new language feature, the "Walrus operator" (PEP 572), that left van Rossum frustrated by online animosity.

 

The Register asked van Rossum to comment for the occasion but he declined, stating that he's not all that interested in promoting himself.

 

Python is currently managed by the Python Steering Council, which consists of five people who serve for the duration of a feature release, the most recent of which was Python 3.9.0 last October. Currently, the group includes: Barry Warsaw, Brett Cannon, Carol Willing, Pablo Galindo Salgado, and Thomas Wouters.

 

These five oversee technical changes to Python and manage the community governance process – a process based on Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs). They coordinate the contributions of more than 90 active core developers and other members of the Python community.

 

For the past 20 years, as of March 6, 2021, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) has supported the language's development. Its aim is to "promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."

"The PSF has a little bit been distanced from the actual maintenance of the language itself," said Ewa Jodlowska, executive director of the PSF, in an interview with The Register. "But through the creation of the Steering Council, that has created a vessel for us to be able to communicate with and work on future funding requests that might aid them in some things that they lack."

 

The Python Foundation has found it difficult to meet its funding goals during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Jodlowska, much of the foundation's revenue has traditionally come from PyCon US. The event was virtual last year and will be again this year, limiting the potential income.

 

Jodlowska said one of the PSF's goals this year is to hire a full-time core developer, an ambition fulfilled on February 11, when Google announced plans to donate more than $350,000 to the PSF to support three projects: a malware detection system for the Python Package Index (PyPI); improvements in Python tools and services; and paying for a CPython Developer-in-Residence for 2021, to work on language maintenance.

 

CPython is the reference implementation of the language, written in C, the one you download from Python.org. But there are others like IronPython (C#), Jython (Java), and PyPy (RPython, a Python subset).

 

Asked what has made Python so successful, Jodlowska cited the importance of the Python community and the role its Code of Conduct plays as a support structure.

"Diversity for the maintainers and core developers of Python is being addressed in several ways," Jodlowska explained.

 

The Code of Conduct, she said, is now being enforced by the Steering Council. That's a big deal, she said, "because prior to the Steering Council existing there really was no enforcement for keeping community discussions civil and welcoming."

 

In theory, the Steering Council's Code of Conduct enforcement will prevent situations like the Walrus operator debate that drove van Rossum to give up his governance role. But to judge by remarks from Python Steering Council member Brett Cannon, moderating community debate simply moves the point of friction from the community to its leadership.

 

Asked via email about the greatest challenge facing the Python community, Cannon said it's just trying to keep up with the size and volume of the project.

"We are still very much a volunteer-run project, but our size demands a lot of time to keep running," he said. "Tack on the usual naysayers for any decision made and it's a lot to manage both from a time and emotion standpoint."

 

At companies like Facebook and Microsoft that moderate the worst sorts of content, the workers who screen toxic posts and violent videos need psychological support. Managing opinionated developers in the Python community may not generate comparable levels of stress, but keeping things civil still appears to take a mental toll, particularly among volunteers.

 

For the Python community, bringing new people in so others can step back or delegate may help mitigate that sense of siege. Jodlowska credits efforts by Python core developers to keep the community vital. "A lot of the current core developers, for example, on their own time mentor others who are interested in becoming core developers," she said. "And there's definitely a steady stream of new incomers that way."

Blessing and a curse

Many of the current leading programming languages have strong corporate associations. Java is the child of Sun and later Oracle. Swift is mainly an Apple affair. C# is tied to Microsoft. Go and Dart arose from Google. JavaScript escaped from Netscape, which provided the browser source code that led to Mozilla, the incubator of Rust.

 

But Python has never enjoyed a doting or overprotective corporate parent, which according to Cannon has been both a liability and a benefit.

"It has hurt us as we have to go out to go searching for funding for everything and we lack paid developers to help keep things running (the best estimate we have is there's a cumulative total of about three to four devs putting in paid time on Python, and one of those is a single person with about 80 per cent time; rest is a smattering from several folks)," he said. "But being independent also means our users never have to worry about us being directed by business needs and can instead always focus on our users and their needs (with the limited resources we have). So it has pluses and minuses."

 

Asked about how Python goes about reconciling interest in new features with concerns about complexity, Cannon acknowledged that it's a constant challenge.

"There's always tension between expanding the language to make developers even more productive while letting it continue to 'fit your brain,'" said Cannon.

 

He said it's a balance of how early on would a new user likely come across a feature; the ease with which someone would recognize, if not comprehend, a feature when seen for the first time; the difficulty of searching for answer to find out how a feature works; and the extent to which a feature's function is memorable to those trying to learn it.

 

Python's other noteworthy obstacle is its scarcity on mobile devices. There are ways to run Python code on phones, like the Kivy framework, but Python isn't the first choice of most mobile app developers.

"I hope it will improve in the next three to five years," said Cannon. "There are several groups that are actively trying to tackle the problem from different angles, but they all require tackling big, hard problems."

 

Thirty years on, Python deserves recognition for what it has accomplished but it can't rest on its laurels. Rival programming languages like Julia and R in data science, and Go in cloud-native applications, have been turning heads. And the need for greater memory safety, to reduce security risks, has helped push TypeScript and Rust into the spotlight. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. 

 

 

Source: Happy birthday, Python, you're 30 years old today: Easy to learn, and the right tool at the right time

[mood]

Python pioneer assesses the 30-year-old programming language

 

 

The Python programming language, which has never been more popular, arguably thanks to the rise of data science and AI projects in the enterprise, officially turns 30 years old tomorrow.

 

One of the five members of the 2021 Python Steering Council within the Python Software Foundation is Pablo Galindo, a software engineer at Bloomberg, who spoke with VentureBeat about the inherent challenges of enabling a language to grow and evolve without sacrificing backward compatibility.

 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

 

VentureBeat: How did you first get involved with Python?

 

Pablo Galindo: I was doing my first year of [my] PhD when I was in Granada. My background is in physics. I used to simulate black holes. The code that normally goes into simulations is compiled in C and C++. Python was a fantastic language to kind of wrap simulation code. I very quickly fell in love with the syntax and the power that it has.

VentureBeat: Has the popularity of Python surprised you?

Galindo: I will say for sure. It surprises me [that] this is still one of the most used languages in the world.

 

VentureBeat: What are some of the most common use cases for Python within Bloomberg?

 

Galindo: We actually use a lot of Python. There are 2,000 developers using Python. The use cases are quite broad. We use Python for things like machine learning models or service-oriented architecture. We have also used Python for a lot of internal user experience tools and developer tools. We also use Python for data transformation.

 

VentureBeat: What’s your current assessment of Python?

 

Galindo: Python is a very mature language, and it has evolved. It also has a bunch of things that it carries over. Python has some baggage that nowadays feels a bit old, but the community and the ecosystem has to be preserved. It’s similar to how C and C++ are evolving right now. When you make changes to the language, it’s quite dangerous [because you can] break things. That’s what people are scared of the most.

 

But even though Python is quite old, there are big changes. The Python 3.1 release for this October will include pattern matching, which is one of the biggest syntax changes that Python has seen in a long time. We can learn from other languages. I think we’re happy to say that we are still evolving and adapting. We have a good experience with respecting the importance of backwards compatibility.

 

VentureBeat: If you could be Python king for a day, what would you change?

 

Galindo: I would be a horrible King for a day. The first order of business would be to fix all these things that we have acquired over the years in the language. That would require breaking a bunch of things. Obviously, I will not do that, but I think one of the things I really would like to see in the future is for Python to become faster than it is. I think Python still has a lot of potential to become faster. I’m thinking this will be impossible. But one can dream.

 

VentureBeat: What do you know now about Python today that you wish you knew when you first began using it?

 

Galindo: I think the most important thing I learned is how many different uses there are for Python. It’s important to listen to all these sorts of users when considering the evolution of the language. It’s quite surprising and quite revealing to consider how changes or improvements will conflict or will interact with other users of the language.

 

That’s something that when I started I didn’t even consider. It would be good if people could be empathetic to us changing the language when we have to balance these things.

 

VentureBeat: What’s your best advice to the leaders of organizations that have adopted Python?

 

Galindo: It’s important to explain in a compelling way to the decision makers of the organization what are the advantages of Python compared to something different. They need to specifically understand how the ecosystem and the languages will transform the organization.

 

The key here is making developers more proactive. Productivity not only means producing more; it is pretty difficult to compete with the speed to market of something that can iterate as fast as Python.

 

The second important thing is the happiness of the developer. Writing code for a developer is a way of expressing themselves. A developer can express themselves in a compiled language. It is kind of more difficult, because the interaction cycles are longer and less interactive. In Python, the syntax doesn’t get in the way. You can say what you want very easily, and experiment.

 

 

Source: Python pioneer assesses the 30-year-old programming language