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I'm curious what the ecosystem for Python looked like in ~1999. Did it show signs of having the ecosystem it has now in those years? I'm certain that almost ev

• nimmer 9y ago
  > what the ecosystem for Python looked like in ~1999 Very small. The language was not popular and many people claimed a community project could not overtake languages backed by companies. Same for the Linux kernel.
  • dom96 9y ago
    Thank you for supporting my point. However, based on your nickname I wouldn't be surprised if you were a little biased :) I would actually love to read some forum/mailing list posts about this. If anyone has any links handy (or knows where to find them) then please post them.
• coldtea 9y ago
  I actually used Python commercially in 1999. The "killer app" then was an app server + document store called Zope. Things were smaller than today, but Python was already gaining popularity for scripting. Circa 2001 or so it also had good Gtk and Qt bindings -- there were even some KDE-inspired satellite commercial companies catering to Python/QT. The discussions in Python land then were about the mythical Python 3000 -- the next, re-imagined version of Python that would fix issues, etc. That was eventually Python 3. Perl was still king for scripting/admin stuff but losing momentum, and Ruby was mentioned as a nice alternative to Python, but with much smaller use at the time (and even today I think).