I guess, in my mind's eye, I see a world in which Python dominated, and that didn't happen: it didn't die the death Perl did, but, in the grand scheme of where

I guess, in my mind's eye, I see a world in which Python dominated, and that didn't happen: it didn't die the death Perl did, but, in the grand scheme of where it was going -- and even what it had been -- it has become a very niched language: we now only really see it in education, machine learning, and (sometimes) system administration (but even that has been losing to Go). It didn't entirely disappear, and it actually got where it was going (unlike Perl 6), but it seems very strange to say it "ended well"... they squandered a decade on some really bad decisions that they only started to undo around 3.3-3.7, and the ecosystem simply moved on (in some cases quite forcefully, such as Google going to great lengths to get off of Python via Go). What else can we call such a fall from grace? If not somehow a debacle it is certainly a tragedy...