Comment by ecshafer
11 hours ago
I don't know if I would say its second-best. It just happened to get really popular because it has relatively easy syntax, and Numpy is a really great library making all of those scientific packages that people were using Fortran and C++ for before available in an easier language. This boosted the language, right when data science became a thing, right when dynamic programming became popular, right when there was a boost in Learn 2 Code forget about learning fundamentals was a thing. Its an okay language I guess, but I really think it was lucky that Numpy exists and Numby or Numphp.
That's not why Python is popular. Python is popular because universities don't provide technical support to researchers (which they should). So those researchers picked up the scripting language the sysops in the univ clusters were using. Those same researchers left academia but never learned any CS or other programming languages. Instead they used the 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail' logic and used Python to glue together libraries, mostly written in C.
PS The big companies that actually make the LLMs, don't use Python (anymore). Its a lousy language for ML/AI. Its designed to script Linux GUIs and automate tasks. Its started off as a Perl replacement afterall. And this isn't a slight on the folks who write Python itself. It is a problem for all the folks who insist on slamming it into all sorts of places that it isn't well suited because they won't learn any CS.