David G. Mackay wrote:
Also, there are several engineers at Red Hat that are very unhappy with the impact that the 3.0 release is going to have on them.
Yes but it has been obvious for a long time that python does not consider backwards compatibility to be important. This shouldn't have come as a surprise. By comparison, perl has been around longer and
Judging by some of the comments on the fedora-devel list, it did anyway.
Maybe some of those developers are young enough to not understand the history. Or to have learned from experience that it matters.
One other consideration is that perl probably has the current advantage in terms of available code library modules. Pretty much anything you can imagine doing has already been done and contributed to CPAN so often the code you have to write yourself is trivial with the modules doing the bulk of the work. Java may be catching up in this regard but I don't think there is a central place to find available code.
Google? ;)
How do you tell google to _not_ give you text matches that are really not about downloadable code modules in the language you want this week?
I guess the real question is how well java is going to prosper under Oracle's ownership. Then again, with openjdk, it might not matter too much.
I don't think that can become much of an issue. On the other hand, some of the other interesting projects (glassfish, opengrok, etc.) might be more likely to go away or change.