anomaly

[Skip Montanaro]

Steven> Python is in production use in hundreds of thousands of
organisations. It
Steven> has been heavily used for over twenty years, in everything
from quick and
Steven> dirty one line scripts to hundred-thousand LOC applications.

Mark> Yeah, so was COBOL.  Boom.

Your point being?

The software development landscape has changed so much since the days
when COBOL was king of data processing that its popularity then had
less to do with some sort of software natural selection than IBM's
utter domination of the computing landscape in the 1960s. If you
bought IBM's hardware (as almost everyone did *), you also got what
they offered in the way of software. I believe (though this is
certainly before my time in the industry) that basically meant FORTRAN
or COBOL (maybe APL? Wow, I've mentioned it twice in one day). In
contrast, software developers and project managers had plenty of
options available when they chose Python.

Skip

* Searching Google for "If it's blue, buy two" doesn't turn up any
obvious hits for this old aphorism (roughly meaning, "If you need to
buy computers, buying IBM is a safe bet", or more to the professional
bottom line of the person making the decision, "Nobody's going to fire
you if you buy an IBM mainframe and it turns out to be the wrong
choice"). Am I the only person who remembers it?