c.l.py dead, news at 11 (was Re: Mangle function name with decorator?)

[andrew cooke]

Erik Max Francis wrote:
[...]
> And made all purdy-like:
>
> 	http://www.alcyone.com/tmp/python-list%20traffic.pdf

That's very pretty, but neither the volume of posts, nor the quality of
the people posting here is really what I was talking about.  I don't think
I explained very well, but seeing the posts here helped clarify things a
little.

c.l.python used to be the core of a community built around a language.  It
no longer is.  It is a very useful place, where some very helpful and
knowledgeable people hang out and give advice, but instead of representing
the full interests of the Python community it is now very much a resource
for helping new users.

At least, that's how it seems to me.  And I don't think this is
necessarily "natural" or "normal" - I think it may be a failure on the
part of someone (who?  I don't quite know, perhaps all of us) in managing
a community.  Now there is an obvious argument against that - that the
language was becoming so popular that a single meeting place was no longer
practical - but without a crystal ball it is hard to know how true that
is, or what alternatives might have been.

I feel quite strongly about this.  I thought that c.l.python was almost
exceptional in the range (the perl group was another, similar community
back then).  I do worry that someone might have screwed up in a quite
major way, and that Python will suffer seriously, in the longer term, as a
result.

Another reason might be that the action has moved on to Haskell.  I get
the impression that it is undergoing the same kind of surge in popularity
from the "smart early adopters" that Python might have benefited from back
in the day (for some perverse reason I am actually moving back to Python
from more strongly typed functional languages).

Andrew