The Varieties of Pythonic Experience (was: Guido at Google)

[Cameron Laird]

In article <1135260776.007318.39050 at g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
Graham Fawcett <graham.fawcett at gmail.com> wrote:
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>...though not a lot of forks/variations that have persisted past the
>early-alpha phase. Many of those projects are stale or defunct, alas.
>
>Personally, I'd point out Scheme as an "open" HLL with a vast number of
>implementations. But I guess it helps when the language itself is a
>spec and there's no canonical implementation.
>
>This all reminds me of one my favourite quotes from python-list of
>yore:
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>    <Thaddeus Olczyk> So python will fork if ActiveState starts
>    polluting it?
>
>    <Brian Quinlan> I find it more relevant to speculate on whether
>    Python would fork if the merpeople start invading our cities
>    riding on the backs of giant king crabs. [1]
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Brian's wise observation on speculation--well, I, too, think it
deserves to be repeated.

Lisp was, in fact, the language I had in mind when thinking about
"multiple implementations".  You are surely right to emphasize the
difference between "language as spec" and "language as implementa-
tion".

My own perspective is not to mourn the dormancy of, say, Vyper,
but to be intrigued by the serious use that continues to be made
of Jython, Stackless, and so on.