Defending the Python lanuage...

[Kragen Sitaker]

"Tim Peters" <tim.one at home.com> writes:
> Open source *is* like that, to the extent that free support is
> relatively easy to get for as long as people like it enough to work on it,
> and even after that support for hire remains a possibility forever.  Would
> that it were so for my copy of, e.g., Macsyma.

One version of Macsyma is now open source:
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/maxima.html

> Software bascially sucks, and you've got to come to terms with that.  The
> reality is that no software you write is going to have a useful lifetime
> spanning even a decade without continual rewriting.

I sure wish some parts of TeX, Emacs, Xlib, and CMUCL had been
rewritten sometime in the last decade.  But they haven't, and I still
manage to use them somehow...