Python vs JavaScript

Python vs JavaScript

Posted Mar 29, 2013 11:07 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Python vs JavaScript by marcH
Parent article: PyCon: Evangelizing Python

Care to elaborate a bit?

Sure, it is just the incompatibility between Python 2.x and 3.x code: it forces library developers to choose to support one or the other, instead of offering a common ground (which developers have found on their own but is still a bit cumbersome). To this day the default packages carried by Debian and Mac OS X (the two operating systems I use) are 2.x, so there is little incentive to upgrade most libraries.

I have spoken a lot about it in the past and received a lot of interesting feedback, so allow me to say just that a different solution would have been much appreciated and might have eased the divide, should such a divide be absolutely necessary (something that I am not sure).

On to the subject of the non-rivality with JavaScript: the PyPI has currently 29444 vs 26256 for npm; in a couple of years node.js is almost at the same number of packages, and that is without counting the huge number of browser-specific libraries. npm is still accelerating. It is hard to find comparable statistics of total downloads and such, but the most popular PyPI package is lxml which has seen about 8M downloads, while the most starred npm package (right on the front page), the web server framework express, has seen 1/17th as many downloads in the last month alone.

It is interesting how Python developers don't seem to see JavaScript as the competition and instead focus on Ruby. For me they cover a very similar space: both are scripting languages that have overstepped their boundaries, both multi-paradigm (although in the case of JavaScript "paradigm" is a bit charitable) and both contenders for the successor of Perl as "the duct tape of the internet".

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