Comment by mucholove
4 years ago
Found it! Amazon also used to run on Emacs.
> Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it.
> People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I
See more here : https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...
Interesting take on Python there, not sure it's aged well:
> Well, they're just like the Smalltalk folks, who waited forever to replace C++, and then Java came along and screwed them royally, and permanently. Oops. Ruby's doing exactly that to Python, right now, today. Practically overnight.
> Python would have taken over the world, but it has two fatal flaws: the whitespace thing, and the permafrost thing.
Yeah, he was totally wrong on Python.
That being said, I'm not sure he would have predicted that data science would be what pushed Python into a better place. Very few people would have, certainly around 2004 or earlier when he was writing it.
Data science + the return of machine learning.
I suspect this is entirely due to the fact that Python looks like pseudo code and has a claim to be beginner friendly. Beyond that, it's baffling that the data science/ML crowd picked Python of all things. Tearing apart CSV files and hammering fuzzy text data into shape is Perl's forte. So I'm surprised Perl didn't see a revival rather than Python. It's possible the entire field doesn't know there is something better, if all they know is one language I suppose. But I'm sure it's part cargo cult too. Everyone uses React because everyone uses React kind of thing. Same with Rails.
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> around 2004 or earlier when he was writing it.
That’s the year Ruby on Rails was released and exploded in popularity. Python wasn’t gone but it suddenly didn’t seem like the rocket ship waiting to launch like it had. I was surprised and delighted with how it has grown in popularity since but it didn’t look good in the mid 2000s.
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I think teaching made Python what it is today. First, so many introductory courses have been using Python, and the more advanced courses (outside CS) followed. Second, I also think that there are (many) more people doing mundane stuff, like web development, than data science.
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