long-term release schedule?

[A. Lloyd Flanagan]

ray at rays-web.com (Ray Smith) wrote in message news:<5654fff9.0306130043.5e8e641a at posting.google.com>...
> Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message news:<3EE93161.1DD519B at engcorp.com>...
> > Ray Smith wrote:
> > > The worrying aspect is that Python (or any development tool a company uses)
> > > becomes unsupported and "no one" is around (paid or unpaid) to continue
> > > development.
> > 

A useful example here is the Ximian product Evolution.  This is a
work-alike to Outlook (hopefully w/o the bugs) developed for Linux
systems.
Ximian actually went bankrupt last year, when Evolution was at about
1.08 (I think).  Even that didn't slow down development much, I just
upgraded to version 1.2.  If Evolution was proprietary it would just
have disappeared...

> I'm about half way through re-writting a small system in Python and estimate 
> it will be about 1/25th the size (line count) of the original and giving more 
> features and "hopefully" less bugs.  
> The old system was designed poorly but that just makes my new Python system 
> look better!!! :)

That's a fairly typical result.  A lot of systems out there are
written in pretty low-level languages (especially C), and python
programs tend to be shorter than even the equivalent Java programs.