<story><title>Python Facts</title><url>http://facts.learnpython.org/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>callahad</author><text>As far as I can tell, Python has a &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; broader base than Ruby, at least in the english-speaking world, but is generally quieter about it. As a few examples:&lt;p&gt;Thanks to SciPy, NumPy, Sage, and so on, Python is extremely popular in scientific computing and academia in general, drawing hundreds each year to Enthought&apos;s Scientific Python conference.&lt;p&gt;Apple&apos;s iCal Server is written in Python with the aid of the Twisted async library, the same library used by LucasFilm for communications in its render farm, or Justin.tv&apos;s caching engine.&lt;p&gt;Google has found great success with Python: YouTube, for instance, is written in Python.&lt;p&gt;Thousands of undergraduates have their introduction to computer science each year taught in Python, even at MIT.&lt;p&gt;And let&apos;s not forget the sizable Django, Pyramid, and Plone web development communities, all of which seem to have surprisingly little overlap.&lt;p&gt;The thing is, Python&apos;s been around for a long time -- longer than Java -- and it&apos;s been useful for a similarly long time, especially in the same domains that Perl traditionally excelled at. Thus, its growth was bottom-up: Many sysadmins were eventually expected to simply know Python just as they were expected to know Shell and Perl, and thus being functionally proficient in Python wasn&apos;t really a defining characteristic.&lt;p&gt;In this way, Python&apos;s expansion has been more of a slow burn as it creeps into more and more corners of software development. Rails, by contrast, came coupled with a wonderful promoter in DHH, and brought scores of front-end talent and PHP refugees into the fold from day one. That audience seems to simply be more innately talented at vocalizing the cool things they&apos;re doing, and making sure they mention that they did it all &quot;...with Ruby!&quot;&lt;p&gt;So while I&apos;d wager that the Python community is larger than the Ruby community, it certainly seems less concentrated, and less vocal about it.&lt;p&gt;To wit, did you know that Dropbox is primarily written in Python? And that the same goes for Eve Online?</text></item><item><author>pace</author><text>Can it be true that the Python coverage on HN is overproportional compared to its real world usage?&lt;p&gt;If I look around the world is full of Ruby and Rails. Sites, libs, meetups, developers, everything is on Ruby or Ruby on Rails. Python and Django devs are so damn rare in real world -- I just know two of 100.&lt;p&gt;Not that I don&apos;t like Python but I am really wondering why Python gets such a strong coverage on HN. Every second day there&apos;s some Python thing on HN. BTW with Clojure it&apos;s the same but Clojure is something new, so I understand the visibility there.&lt;p&gt;Please don&apos;t downvote -- it&apos;s nothing against Python, I just want to see if the Python base increased or something happend I&apos;ve missed. Thanks&lt;p&gt;How can it be?&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Thanks to all for the replies. What&apos;s interesting about this thread: I got tons of downvotes (besides upvotes) for the first comment. So, I assume this Python vs Ruby discussion seems to be a very emotional topic. Thanks to the replies I have now a better understanding that Python is older and dominant in a many non-web environments. My impression is still that especially in web environments we have much more pace and development in Rails than Django (just compare what DHH put in 3.1, Coffee, Sass, etc.  -- no flame war just a questions dear downvoters, don&apos;t freak out again)--Rails feels just more vibrant regarding web dev. But Rails is not Ruby ;-) It&apos;s just that I see all the Python stuff on HN -- which is slightly focussed on online/web/Internet -- and I really considered learning Python for web dev until I checked &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.de/trends?q=python+django%2C+ruby+rails&amp;#38;ctab=0&amp;#38;geo=all&amp;#38;date=all&amp;#38;sort=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.google.de/trends?q=python+django%2C+ruby+rails&amp;#3...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: but there&apos;s a new rising star:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.de/trends?q=python+django%2C+ruby+rails%2C+node.js&amp;#38;ctab=0&amp;#38;geo=all&amp;#38;date=all&amp;#38;sort=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.google.de/trends?q=python+django%2C+ruby+rails%2C...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joeyespo</author><text>&amp;#62; but is generally quieter about it&lt;p&gt;As someone who uses Python (as well as C# and various others where appropriate) often outside work, this has been exactly my experience.&lt;p&gt;I only recently discovered a Python meetup in my area and have been extremely impressed with everybody there.&lt;p&gt;Python is an amazing language with a powerful module system and vast community to rapidly prototype and research almost anything. That said, I care less about its &quot;beauty&quot; and more about its minimalist, lack-of-magic Pythonic philosophy backing the language that lets me get things done quickly and collaborate with others with little overhead.</text></comment>
<story><title>Python Facts</title><url>http://facts.learnpython.org/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>callahad</author><text>As far as I can tell, Python has a &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; broader base than Ruby, at least in the english-speaking world, but is generally quieter about it. As a few examples:&lt;p&gt;Thanks to SciPy, NumPy, Sage, and so on, Python is extremely popular in scientific computing and academia in general, drawing hundreds each year to Enthought&apos;s Scientific Python conference.&lt;p&gt;Apple&apos;s iCal Server is written in Python with the aid of the Twisted async library, the same library used by LucasFilm for communications in its render farm, or Justin.tv&apos;s caching engine.&lt;p&gt;Google has found great success with Python: YouTube, for instance, is written in Python.&lt;p&gt;Thousands of undergraduates have their introduction to computer science each year taught in Python, even at MIT.&lt;p&gt;And let&apos;s not forget the sizable Django, Pyramid, and Plone web development communities, all of which seem to have surprisingly little overlap.&lt;p&gt;The thing is, Python&apos;s been around for a long time -- longer than Java -- and it&apos;s been useful for a similarly long time, especially in the same domains that Perl traditionally excelled at. Thus, its growth was bottom-up: Many sysadmins were eventually expected to simply know Python just as they were expected to know Shell and Perl, and thus being functionally proficient in Python wasn&apos;t really a defining characteristic.&lt;p&gt;In this way, Python&apos;s expansion has been more of a slow burn as it creeps into more and more corners of software development. Rails, by contrast, came coupled with a wonderful promoter in DHH, and brought scores of front-end talent and PHP refugees into the fold from day one. That audience seems to simply be more innately talented at vocalizing the cool things they&apos;re doing, and making sure they mention that they did it all &quot;...with Ruby!&quot;&lt;p&gt;So while I&apos;d wager that the Python community is larger than the Ruby community, it certainly seems less concentrated, and less vocal about it.&lt;p&gt;To wit, did you know that Dropbox is primarily written in Python? And that the same goes for Eve Online?</text></item><item><author>pace</author><text>Can it be true that the Python coverage on HN is overproportional compared to its real world usage?&lt;p&gt;If I look around the world is full of Ruby and Rails. Sites, libs, meetups, developers, everything is on Ruby or Ruby on Rails. Python and Django devs are so damn rare in real world -- I just know two of 100.&lt;p&gt;Not that I don&apos;t like Python but I am really wondering why Python gets such a strong coverage on HN. Every second day there&apos;s some Python thing on HN. BTW with Clojure it&apos;s the same but Clojure is something new, so I understand the visibility there.&lt;p&gt;Please don&apos;t downvote -- it&apos;s nothing against Python, I just want to see if the Python base increased or something happend I&apos;ve missed. Thanks&lt;p&gt;How can it be?&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Thanks to all for the replies. What&apos;s interesting about this thread: I got tons of downvotes (besides upvotes) for the first comment. So, I assume this Python vs Ruby discussion seems to be a very emotional topic. Thanks to the replies I have now a better understanding that Python is older and dominant in a many non-web environments. My impression is still that especially in web environments we have much more pace and development in Rails than Django (just compare what DHH put in 3.1, Coffee, Sass, etc.  -- no flame war just a questions dear downvoters, don&apos;t freak out again)--Rails feels just more vibrant regarding web dev. But Rails is not Ruby ;-) It&apos;s just that I see all the Python stuff on HN -- which is slightly focussed on online/web/Internet -- and I really considered learning Python for web dev until I checked &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.de/trends?q=python+django%2C+ruby+rails&amp;#38;ctab=0&amp;#38;geo=all&amp;#38;date=all&amp;#38;sort=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.google.de/trends?q=python+django%2C+ruby+rails&amp;#3...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: but there&apos;s a new rising star:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.de/trends?q=python+django%2C+ruby+rails%2C+node.js&amp;#38;ctab=0&amp;#38;geo=all&amp;#38;date=all&amp;#38;sort=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.google.de/trends?q=python+django%2C+ruby+rails%2C...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ludwigvan</author><text>Google, the search engine, was written in Python for a period of time, after an initial attempt in Java.&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com/Code-Quality/What-was-the-code-quality-of-the-initial-version-of-Google&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.quora.com/Code-Quality/What-was-the-code-quality-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>