Interesting article.

I remember when I tried Python six or seven years ago. At that time, I didn't see it as a "mainstream" language, and (judge me if you want) perhaps that's what attracted me to it, and at the same time frustrated me.

At the same time, I wanted the oportunity to use it (for practice in my job at the time, and so it had to be known by my employer), but didn't want to see it bloated and surrounded by people who know more about marketing strategies than anything about programming.

That's a bit challenging. Now, we fast-forward it to this year and, at least from my point of view, it really got mainstream, but it seems there's a price for that. As I feared, it got assaulted by people who know nothing and couldn't care less about real programming.

"Robustness, performance, stability, portability? No, shiny new features are all that really matter..."

And let me state it very clear: this is not to say that a Python programmer is a bad programmer, but that many bad programmers are trying Python, and thus hijacking it, promoting it as something it didn't use to be. I'm not even sure if these could be considered a majority, but they're noisy.

So, that raises the question: did Python win, after all? Because now, when you say you're part of a Python group, you may be confused with "charlatans". Real Python programmers have no guilt on that, of course, but it's a situation that got out of control, unfortunately.

In many of these "Python circles", it seems like programming is not at all an art. Creating a beautiful piece of code is not important in such circles. Self-promoting is.

So, if that's considered a victory, I definitely wouldn't want to see Perl win. Ever. Having lost is appealing enough for me.

(I think this last part contrasts a bit with my signature, which should only apply to perl code, not Perl culture :)