Is anybody surprised by this? Everybody knew the transition was going to take a long time, and that it would be a gradual process. It may be that it's actually been even slower and more gradual than people expected, but by and large everything seems to be proceeding nicely.
And actually, that may be a great sign of a healthy, mature community. Python has reached and held a level of maturity at which change happens slowly and methodically.
In fact, Google Trends [1] seems to indicate that, too. After what was probably an initial stomach-drop of broken compatibility, python is picking up a lot of new developers again.
Haha maybe it's just the HN effect but I was very surprised to see Java at ~20%, having increased ~5% over the last year (I guess Android is Java, though).
That, and the facts that Rust is ahead of Go, and that the two of them sit at only ~0.4% usage combined.
Yeah, some of that stuff just doesn't seem realistic. Look at some of the languages that are ahead of Scala for example, and note that Clojure isn't even in the top 50 right now. That seems like a real stretch to me.
I mean, you have D WAY ahead of Clojure? Seriously? Not to knock D, or @walterbright, but does anybody buy that D has significantly more industry adoption than Clojure does?
Hey, maybe I'm wrong, or maybe it is the "HN effect", but that's why I say that I consider the Tiobe Index "suspect". For the top 10 or so, it's probably a decent approximation, but beyond that I think it's highly, highly questionable.
You might need to rebase your assumptions. Big banking, big governments, big everything is big and use a lot of Java I guess.
I don't get what you're saying. I didn't say anything about Java being on top, except to specifically say that Tiobe is probably a reasonable approximation near the top. It's the "long tail" that I think gets especially hinky.
I guess I misread you as supporting andrewstuart2 and I'm sorry for that.
I have however not downvoted you, so if anyone did it was somebody else.
(btw: seems I've crossed some magical threshold and people seems to be upvoting almost anything I write now. Might be time to create a new account, again :-P)
> Not to knock D, or @walterbright, but does anybody buy that D has significantly more industry adoption than Clojure does?
Yes. D has a very clear use case and makes sense for it (and didn't have a lot of competition there until the rise of Rust). Clojure has a lot of (often vocal) fans but in practice the compelling case over the more popular Scala just isn't there - at least that's what I've seen in multiple-languages-but-JVM shops (biased by the fact that I'm a Scala programmer myself). You'd get a few Clojure fans who would talk the language up, but nothing in actual use.
I dunno... I never hear of anybody using "D" other than Facebook. In fact, I never hear D mentioned at all except here on HN. OTOH, I know people actually using Clojure in industry. There also seems to be more Clojure activity on Github, which I take as something of a proxy for interest in the language.
Of course, my view may be tainted by the fact that I live very near Relevance and know and interact with a few of the Relevance people.
Anyway, this isn't specifically about D or Clojure. I just generally think that the long tail of the Tiobe index looks pretty fishy at times.
Though Clojure fans like various aspects of the language, Clojure's use case is being a Java replacement (or else integrating very well with Java) in non-free-software enterprise shops, specifically for when you need multithreading while working on large amounts of data.
And for exactly that use case, there is industry adoption.
But Scala has better Java integration, and is very good at working with large amounts of data. (Also the space where you need multithreading but not distribution is extremely narrow, and when you go distributed Spark is fantastic).
I can actually see that as being real. There is a lot of legacy code out there (especially in larger corporations) and, while these languages are rarely featured in the news, many people are required to use them at work.
I know someone whose job is to maintain COBOL code for the State of Texas. Government organizations have even more difficulty upgrading IT infrastructure than large corporations do, and there are a lot more of them that can survive a lot longer than there are large corporations.
It's the defacto language to learn at the university level. And many large companies use it on the backend (Google and Amazon). Small companies who outsource to cheap labor overseas will probably have their work done in Java on the server-side (though this is changing).
Go may be recognized in the Valley. But it doesn't have much usage outside the startup world (and Google). And only a portion of startups here use it too.
Swift is the de-facto future replacement of Objective-C for Apple ecosystem. It's got a while to go yet - a stable ABI for one - but once that happens (with Swift 3 later this year) then you'll start to see it take off. Plus, since it was open sourced it has been made to run on Linux and Raspberry Pi devices and has attracted a hugely varied and vocal community.
I don't think anyone expected a lengthy transition at the onset of the version 3 release. It's taken a long time and the 2.X releases that have come along since have helped make the transition easier by showing developers some of the benefits from version 3 releases.
I was on the "Python 3000" mailing list while it was being planned, and the prevailing attitude seemed to be "it'll probably take 5 years before the community moves to Python 3". (That's paraphrased and not a direct quote, though I saw people say that sort of thing almost word for word a few times.)
This was optimistic, but at least we see that the community is indeed gradually moving to Python 3, even if it's taking a few more years.
Technically the goal was a majority of new projects started using Python 3 in 5 years. Regardless, everyone knew it would take several years to reach a point like this.
I switched from Perl to Python at version 3.4, and while it might be popular for people already invested in Python 2 to downplay the syntactic improvements, they were a big deal in convincing me to switch to Python as my go-to infrastructure language.
This is true, but currently, most of developers of Python acknowledge some mistakes in the Python 3 transition. Specifically the fact that such an abrupt compatibility break was underestimated. And that's why Python 4 won't break compatibility with Python 3.
In any case, I'm very happy to see the Python 3 transition moving forward. And let's hope this does not happen again.
Python's back-porting of 3.x features caused Python 3 adoption to take even longer (no pain, no gain). But, I think this was a necessary evil, because if PSF had forced everyone with a "upgrade or perish" attitude, I think many would have abandoned Python.
Pretty sure there would be a fork. Many large tech companies (Google, Dropbox for two) are deeply invested in Python 2, and some of us already have some modifications to CPython. Python 2 is Too Big to Fail.
I disagree. The main thing holding back Python 3 use has been library support. Library developers do no want to maintain two separate codebases, so it is very important that a certain subset of the language works under both 2 and 3. The backported features in Python 2 and some backwards compatibility added to Python 3 in recent years have really helped with that.
