[PREV - BACK_SCRATCH]    [TOP]

SNAKE_SCRATCH

                                             May 16, 2023

 From Steven Levy's "In the Plex" (2011), p. 17,18:

     "Part of the problem was that Page was
     using the relatively new computer language
     Java for his ambitious project, and Java        Despite many stories out
     kept crashing.  'I went and tried to fix        there of Java flops like
     some of the bugs in Java itself, and after      this, Java somehow has
     doing this ten times, I decided it was a        persevered-- it remains a
     waste of time,' says Hassan.  'I decided to     commonly used language.
     take his stuff and just rewrite it into the     It has an unshakeable
     language I knew much better that didn't         corporate-friendly image
     have any bugs.'"                                irrespective of it's
                                                     technical merits, if any.
     "He wrote a program in Python-- a more
     flexible language that was becoming                 When the buzz is on,
     popular for web-based programs-- that               you get time to fix
     would act as a 'spider,' so called                  the problems.  If
     because it would crawl the web for data."           they were looking for
                                                         reasons to drop it,
         The phrasing here ("becoming popular")          the problems would
         hides the fact that it (a) wasn't all           be seized on as an
         that popular yet (b) it wasn't really           the obvious reason.
         that good.
                                                            The *actual*
             Better than Java, for sure, but                reason things
             worse than Perl in terms of                    succeed or fail
             performance and library support                aren't often
             back in those days.                            the things you
                                                            hear talked about.
             What Python had going for it
             was mainly more snob appeal
             than Perl, and this embrace of
             Python by the googlers is
             arguably one of the big things
             that put Python over...

             The revenge of the CS insiders
             over that weirdo outsider
             language.




--------
[NEXT - THE_FUTURE_IS_NOW]