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> More than anything, I would say that what "went wrong" is simply that the wind changed. Tech is driven by fashion more than anything else, That's not my reco
by mncharity 9y ago
> More than anything, I would say that what "went wrong" is simply that the wind changed. Tech is driven by fashion more than anything else,
That's not my recollection. And I disagree with the fashion thesis too. :)
So I used Tcl, perl, and python in the early 90's. Tcl owned embedding and Tk. Perl owned sysadmin and CPAN. And was fast. Python owned OO and "nice professionalism". Perl and python had hashes. Tcl got hashes. Tcl and perl picked up OO. Perl and python mooched Tk. But Tcl remained furry and batteries not included. Perl remained buggy and weird and unprofessional. And python remained without good code sharing. Turns out people wanted "nice" more than embeddability or CPAN. All three communities knew what their strengths and weaknesses were. And were variously able to deal with the weaknesses, or not.
- neves 9y agoPython also became easy to extend, you even had great tools like Swig http://swig.org/ http://swig.org/. Today some of main Python libraries are in C, specially the ones that need speed, like numpy, pandas and all the Data Science eco-system. Desktop user interfaces became less important with the Web. Python also got a good regexp engine. Its legibility, batteries included and interactive shell beat them all.
- gaius 9y agoPython also became easy to extend, you even had great tools like Swig Ironically SWIG originated on Tcl, IIRC