Seeing such clever use of mmap makes me dread to imagine how much Python spaghetti probably tanks OpenAI's and other "big ML" shops' infra when they should've trusted in zero copy solutions.
Perhaps SWE is dead after all, but LLMs didn't kill it...
On the other hand, many business and professionals wouldn't exist :)
It's not the easiest syntax, not the best compiler support, performance and threading is a joke. The entire language is based on hype back from the time when the only two mainstream languages were C++ and Java.
Pull requests and stars on github? That might be a start.
https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2022/4 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/stars/2022/4
Though you may say but but alltheprivaterepos! Then I challenge you to back up what you mean by relevance and prove python is a category of relevant 15+ years ago.
Even if it doesn't have the best syntax now (which I doubt), the tooling and libraries make it a better choice over any language that have an edge over python syntax.
The forced use of spacing to delineate blocks means you will never see a bunch of brackets eating up screen space and the common error where someone adds another line to an if statement but doesn't add braces.
Semicolons not being conventional means less screen noise and less code golf 1 liners.
The focus on imperative vs functional means you rarely ever see something like this a(b(c(d(e(f(g))))
PHP suffers greatly from poorly named standard functions on top of all of that.
Don't get me started on Ruby metaprogramming.
These are just the things I could think of off the top of my head. I do not want to spend my afternoon on this. This is just my experience looking at code for over 20 years, you either believe it or you don't. There's no scientific studies to prove that 1 syntax feature is superior.
I highly doubt that everyone chose python just because Google did. Python was a giant step in syntax compared to the competition back then, and now even if there is a new language out there right now that has a better syntax, it's not going to be better by much, and it is not going to have the tooling, libraries, or the community.
Maybe, not sure? My point was that both the syntax and Google using it was more relevant 15 years ago than now.
(I don't have much of an opinion on the 15+ years ago thing.)
Is python syntax worse than any brand new languages like rust or go? Absolutely not. It's still better.
Did Google stop using it? I don't think so, but I also don't think people picked it just because Google did.
Btw, I wish they would take some inspiration from Haskell's syntax.
Haskell also has significant whitespace, but its defined as syntactic sugar for a more traditionally syntax with curly braces and semicolons.
Approximately no-one uses that curly-brace syntax, but it's good for two things:
- silences the naysayers
- more importantly: allows you to copy-paste code even into forms that mess up your indentation.