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Comment by Aldipower | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript had Netscape behind it, TypeScript has Microsoft behind it, Rust had Mozilla behind it, Go has Google behind it, Java had Sun behind it, C++ had AT&T behind it, and so on..

Borgo?

Cannot think about much languages that haven't any bigger company behind it. PHP maybe? To an extend Python? But today Python good pushed by the big companies of the AI hype.

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Python was obscure and developed in silence for 15 years before it caught on. The team behind it just never gave up. Most people who develop independent languages give up after a year or five. Lua is similar, though it and PHP both caught on faster because they both put embedding upfront, which allowed them to be built into game engines and websites built with C.

Python also fits its design space amazingly well (that's what's meant by "Guido's time machine"). It's a glue language, with a REPL, but it's not a shell (i.e. it's not meant to glue programs primarily through stdin/stdout/argv, but instead libraries through their APIs). It was a very useful (Greenspun's tenth rule) and somewhat underserved niche (perl, scheme and tcl come to mind).

I know this is a really late reply, but your comment says ‘[i]t was a …’. Was that just an odd choice of tense or are you arguing that Python is no longer useful for its niche? If so, and I’m genuinely asking, is there a replacement for the glue language aspect that retains Pythons wide standard library approach?

I think your recollection of Python is a bit off. Python wasn't really obscure or developed in silence. If you needed a glue language for a unix system, then there were really only three choices: Perl 5, TCL/tk, and Python.

If you worked in a career where you needed a glue language, then you were at the very least aware that Python existed.

Python got a massive push from Google too. At one point (Early 2000s?) they were hiring a ton of python developers.

What kicked Python on 2000's was Zope, everyone was into Zope, like Rails almost a decade later.

In my mind the fact that Go has Google behind it is the main reason it caught on (and quickly). It would have been completely ignored otherwise.

I think that's the point.

That + the individuals involved. Without the company backing + different (not already-"famous" [programmer famous]) people involved, it would have been completely ignored.

Note that the same individuals weren't that lucky with Plan 9, Inferno and Limbo, or Oberon.

Employeer vibes matter.

Google and Academia pushed Python in the 00s.

>Cannot think about much languages that haven't any bigger company behind it.

Ruby.

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