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? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
