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Comment by jon_adler | Hacker News Reader

Python is an interesting example to choose as a negative example. I presume you are referring to the evolution from v2 to v3. The popularity of Python has exploded in recent years, possibly as a direct consequence of tough decisions and breaking backward compatibility. I guess it is a subjective topic and an individuals position depends on how they define success.

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Yeah. I'm always a little confused by this. It's still one of the most popular languages and growing for a reason. It surely isn't perfect, but no technology is. The tradeoffs they made have worked really well for a lot of people.

When looking at stats for Python's growth we have to remember 2 things. The number of libraries on PyPi is inflated by the same spam phenomenon which has infected npm, producing ludicrous library upload stats. Second, a large section of the Python userbase is non-programmers using it in a lab context to crunch some data and produce a pretty graph. Might as well be R or Matlab.

I think that's just your own experience being extrapolated a bit too much. In my own industry I'm aware of a few dozen commercial products. Every single one has a first class Python API. Most only have the one Python API. All academic scientists and engineers in industry (in my field) use Python with a little Julia, Matlab, or C++. It's presence has grown a lot in the past decade. In IT, there's also Java, C#, and Go.

True, I've seen this with many projects in general (even outside software), the quality goes down as the quantity (of people involved) increases.

True, I've seen this with my projects in general (even outside software), the quality goes down as the quantity (of people involved) increases.

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