I never understood this thing about "communities". It's not like someone marry a language and a community, and exclusively use only that language for everything, and then, when some better/newer language comes, divorce from the "community" not ever to touch it again.<p>Come, we are all adults. Use the right tool for the job, and belong to many (or none) communities. Your favorite programming language is not your identity.
What strikes me most about both Ian's history and Armin's is "Starting again". Rewrites, starting over having learnt more the first time. Yet the idea of that happening in a commercial setting is ludicrous for almost every company I have known. Yet perhaps look at Apple's development of the iPhone - a constant set of retries trying to get past a single Jobs.<p>It might be important to remember ...
This is a much needed counter-balance to Ian's post. While I can understand the technology reasons for moving away from Python, the community remains the most important reason for hanging on to it. I believe, which ever open source tool one chooses to use, the community should be one of most, if not the most, important criteria.
A bit off-topic, I would like to view the hype-trend of programming languages on Google Trends. The new Google Trends interface allows one to search for "Ruby" the programming language and not Ruby the mineral.<p>Google Trends - programming languages:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=/m/060kv,+/m/06ff5,+/m/02p97,+/m/05zrn&cmpt=q&content=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=/m/060kv,+/m...</a><p>But I have troubles with Python, as the search suggestions show me Python molurus, Monty Python, Python reticulatus, Burmese python but sadly "Python" the language is missing. Maybe someone found a solution how to input Python (the language).
I wonder where most people go from python? As has been mentioned in other threads (specifically the comments on Ian Bicking's recent blog post) many seem to be moving on. Where are you all going? Personally after having been a python dev for a long time, I now self identify as a Haskeller (although I'd certainly still use python for many tasks over Haskell). I find Haskell to be as mind expanding now as python was when I taught myself to code ~10 years ago.<p>I've seen others mention clojure and go as jumping off points. So, those of you who feel you have "moved on" from python, where would you say you hang your digital hat nowadays?