Ruby was competing on the web market and lost to many others, including Python. In part, because python had a much broader ecosystem, and php had wide adoption through wordpress and others, and javascript was expanding from browsers.
It is EVERYWHERE. I recently had to interview a bunch of data scientists, and only one of them knew SQL. Surely, all of then worked with python. I bet none of them even heard of R.
The focus of SAS and R were primarily limited to data science-related fields; however, Python is a far more generic programming language, thus the number of folks exposed to it is wider and thus the hiring pool of those who come in exposed to Python is FAR LARGER than SAS/R ever were, even when SAS was actively taught/utilized in undergraduate/graduate programs.
As a hiring leader in the Data Science and Engineering space, I have extensive experience with all of these + SQL, among others. Hiring has become much easier to go cross-field/post-secondary experience and find capable folks who can hit the ground running.
It was a great language, but it was/is extremely cost-prohibitive plus it simply fell out of favor in academia, for many of the same reasons, and thus was supplanted by free alternatives.
Experienced Data Scientists and/or those straight out of school are EXTREMELY lacking in valuable SQL experience and always have been. Take a DS with 25 years experience in SAS, many of them are great with DATAstep, but have far less experience using PROC SQL for querying the data in the most effective way--even if they were pulling the data down with pass-through via SAS/ACCESS.
Often they'd be doing very simplistic querying and then manipulating via DATAstep prior to running whatever modeling and/or reporting PROCs later, rather than pushing it upstream into a far faster native database SQL pull via pass-through.
Back in 2008/2009, I saved 30h+ runtime on a regular report by refactoring everything in SQL via pass-through as opposed to the data scientists' original code that simply pulled the data down from the external source and manipulated it in DATAstep. Moving from 30h to 3m (Oracle backend) freed up an entire FTE to do more than babysit a long-running job 3x a week to multiple times per day.
I think the key thing not obvious to most data scientists is they're not using python because it meets their needs, it's because we've failed them. twice.
1. data scientists aren't programmers, so why do they need a programming language? the tools they should be using don't exist. they'd need programmers to make them, and all we have to offer is... more programming languages.
2. the giant problem at the heart of modern software: the most important feature of a modern programming language is being easy to read and write. this feature is conspicuously absent from most important languages.
they're trapped. they can't do what they need without a programming language but there are only a handful they can possibly use. the real reason python ended up with such good library support is they never really had a choice.
When the first scientific libraries were written for python, most alternatives didn't even consider being readable, or convenient. The choice was more like C/Cpp/Fortran vs Python.
And then Python went into a self-reinforcing loop, with scientific community coming up with more and more ways to improve Python support for the kind of interactive work that was required for data analysis. Think ipython -> jupyter -> jupyter forks and other python-centric notebook systems.
So when data analysis evolved into data science and machine learning, gpu-first library vendors already faced a crowd of people knowing python.
It is crazy how right now one can utilize 100s of gpus through these bits of dirty python wrapped in json.
QuakeC was compiled into QuakeVM bytecode, which made all modes and logic portable between platforms without having to recompile things everytime, unlike what had to be done for Quake 2 (which was 100% native code).
This hurt performance a bit but in the longer term benefited the modding scene massively.
Remember that the majority of users doesn't use anything other than the default steam store ui. This case works like charm. I use with my tv, or standalone, my 10 year old uses, and we love it. I just make sure to play games announced as supported.
With custom things, desktop mode, non-steam software installation it's a typical customization story. It is amazing that you can do it at all but nobody will be supporting you on this journey.
Unlike C/C++, Zig is not inherently memory-unsafe.
Where Rust insists on having either partial safety through the checker or lack of control in unsafe code, Zig provides a toolkit for contructing safe frameworks. Zig also doesn't have main sources of unsafety coming from certain C design mistakes.
Besides, if you are after true memory safety then garbage collection is the way to go.
Mate, we're not talking about the future, but about 3 letter guys now. I'm one, I've carried it with me for 40+ years as have the ten or twenty peers of mine I know by their tla. I got it at pobox.com when the door opened, the guy at the desk next door got a one letter name. I set up campus email for the entire uni in 1989 and gave myself the tla with my superuser rights before that. I'd done the same at ucl-cs in 85, and before that in Leeds and York.
My point here is we're not famous we're just old enough to have a tla from the time before HR demanded everyone get given.surname.
Every Unix system used to ship with a dmr account. It doesn't mean we all knew Dennis Ritchie, it means the account was in the release tape.
There are 17,000 odd of us. Ekr, Kre and Djb are famous but the other 17,573 of us exist.
I'm not sure what your point is here. OP was clearly using "three letter guy" in the sense "so famous people know them by their initials". This is hardly unread of, e.g. https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeLetterPerson
It was the "Great to see _some_ 3letter guy into this" underlined some that.
It felt bit like s/some/random/g perhaps would apply when reading it. Intentional or not by writer. It made me long and write my comment. There are many 3letter user accounts, which some are more famous than others. To my generation not because they were early users, but great things what they have done. I'm early user too and done things then still quite widely being used with many distributions, but wouldn't compare my achievements to those who became famous and known widely by their account, short or long.
Anyhow I thought that "djb" ring bell anyone having been around for while. Not just those who have been around early 90 or so when he was held renegade opinions he expressed programming style (qmail, dj dns, etc.), dragged to court of ITAR issues etc.
But because of his latter work with cryptography and running cr.yp.to site for quite long time.
Is this because they're that famous though or simply because there weren't as many people in the scene back then? We just don't do the initials thing anymore.
Yes: the fame is the subtext. It's akin to mononyms; they'd be referring to famous people like Shakira, Madonna, or Beyoncé. A lot of us have first names, but the point isn't that one's family calls them "Dave" without ambiguity.
There were many unix instances, and likely multiple djb logins around the world, but there's only one considered to be the djb, and it's dur to fame.
The thing is that dragons and magic and Harry Potter all become irrelevant at some point in life. Power fantasies do have an expiration date.
Now, the genre itself, all the storytelling involved, can easily be adapted to more serious, or even abstract, thinking.
In fact, it was, and there are plenty of alternative rpg universes. But, similar to how serious non-marvel movies are a niche, serious rpgs are also less popular.
I understand where you are coming from, but I hope you realize this is very subjective. The things you mentioned and other elements of the fantasy genre do not become irrelevant for many people through their life, well into adult life as well. In fact, they may become irrelevant and become relevant again.
Just to make it clear (and perhaps to state the obvious), you are not believing in these when you play these games or read these books, you are voluntarily suspending disbelief.
They're all games. They're all escapist power fantasies. No one wants to role play a character who doesn't matter to the story, regardless of the genre.
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