Nvidia, Continuum team up to sling Python at GPU coprocessors The Tesla GPU coprocessor and its peers inside your Nvidia graphics cards will soon speak with a forked tongue. Continuum Analytics has been working with the GPU-maker to create the NumbaPro Python-to-GPU compiler. We all call it the LAMP stack, but it should really be called LAMPPP or LAMP3 or some such because it is Linux, …
>I call balls
From the CodeEval website, re those figures:
"Statistics and Figures are based on a sample size of over 100,000+ challenges processed from Employers who have run challenges on CodeEval in 2012.
About CodeEval
CodeEval is a community of developers interested in solving programming challenges. Community members can compete with each other, challenge their friends and build out their profiles to showcase to friends and employers too."
So it isn't necessarily the worlds most popular coding language, just the most popular amongst competitors on this website.
TIOBE is the language popularity list that I see most frequently mentioned: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
Python comes in 9th there, with Java and C fairly predictably in the lead. I've no idea how valid its figures are.
> What total retard decided to use invisible whitespace to denote code blocks?
Someone with a decent text editor that doesn't put tabs* in the text randomly instead of (correctly) filling whitespace with spaces, or at least visibly showing tabs.
> What was wrong with curly braces.
The principle of indenting is 'what you see is what you get'. Spurious or wrongly indented curly braces, or other start/stop symbols or words, can disguise the real indenting.
> This single issue is a show stopper than prevents adoption for me
No. It is your text editor, or settings within it that are the show stopper. Set or get the editor that will never use tab characters and everything will work fine.
* Tab is short for Tabulate: make into a table. Source code is not a table, so don't use tabs.
Syntactic preferences indeed run deep. Different strokes for different folks.
My personal take on the matter is that I like indentation because a) it makes sense to me and b) I indent anyway so 2 birds with one stone.
I know I will never do Lisp because I hate dealing with parenthesis nesting at that level. Makes my head bluescreen. But, unlike you, I am clever enough not to call the Lisp designers a bunch of retards.
I also deeply regret Objective C's bracket-based syntax, but I can see myself just bucking up and jumping in at some point. Unlike Lisp, it's an annoyance but one I can live with.
Cobol's column constraints are mostly an annoyance, but not a deal breaker on their own.
At the end of the day, there is no 11th commandment about curly braces. Whether or not someone is willing to try a new programming style is a matter of choice, many languages are available to choose from.
Python is elegant and very pleasant to work with, for me. But its whitespaces are mostly a take it or leave it. Nobody is forcing you to.
A bit more tact wouldna hurt tho.
Unless someone funds some proper market research (and why would they) we will never really know what languages people really use. Assuming of course you can agree what counts as programming. Does using IF(logical_test,value_if_true,value_if_false) in Excel count?
Most of these measures are measures of people jumping up and down squeaking more than anything. Clearly if a, say, Fortran programmer buys one book every ten years, changes jobs every twenty and doesn't blog or post to forums they aren't going show up , whereas a 22 year old using Python on Pails and Javascript in Jails tweeting every commit to the tosspothub version control repository is.
It could well be due to that, and you got an upvote from me for the chuckes :)
I know quite a lot of "22 year old using Python on Pails and Javascript in Jails tweeting every commit" people, and boy do they annoy me. I see them more as fad chasers than actual programmers. I remember a few years ago they were banging on about Ruby.
I will admit though, I have been a Python programmer since the early 2000's, and I do love the language. The whitespace thing is odd, but it's not the end of the world for me. Especially as I find development so fast and easy in it.
I personally have been using pyCUDA, which provides pretty good integration, minus the fact that the actual CUDA GPU code must be written in C, so I guess this is the natural progression of the technology.
You can even use the languge for FPGA programming (using myhdl), and when I have some free time I will see how that works.
Fanboyism aside, it does seem like a very flexible and useful language, which also retains easy redability (especially when multiple people work on a codebase).
Python along with NumPy and SciPy have been used for numerical coding applications for years. NumbaPro allows users to make NumPy code even faster. Here are some links for further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NumPy
http://continuum.io/blog/simple-wave-simulation-with-numba-and-pygame
http://continuum.io/blog/the-python-and-the-complied-python
Glad there's another way to use those GPU's from dynamic languages. I was a little startled to learn that NumPy didn't already use the GPU though I see from another poster that's been taken care of with "numba" (and of course with this new module, huzzah!) In the Perl world, we have PDL, which can send number-crunching tasks to both GPU's and multi-core CPU's. It's also in the MATLAB/Octave/NumPy family. Good company!
That diagram must be faulty. FORTRAN isn't there at all.
Yes, it's a minority language these days. However, for those who do serious scientific number-crunching, it's definitely very far from being a Norwegian Blue. FORTRAN-95 and successors allow a compiler to generate efficient parallel code (which C / C++ can't, because of pointers).
Python has a big foot in that camp as well. It's great for writing top-level code, with SciPy and NumPy and lesser-known friends at lower levels to do the heavy lifting.
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