Chandler
Prompted by this article on Chandler, I did a little bit of digging on Chandler. I remember Chandler being launched and a bunch of people sending me emails about this Outlook killer. They were all very excited by it, but me being the grumpy git said "yeah right". I was mildly interested for one reason: it was written in Python.
Like most people I tried some builds and then some more and still there wasn't anything there. It was a shame and it quickly dived off the radar. Looks like the application is reaching a turning point and may or may not be around much longer. A quick review sounds like its the planning and not the code that's the problem.
Joel pointed out the problems you get trying to do an open source project, something Alan and Alex found a long time ago with Plone. You have to make something before people will contribute:
But when you have an app that doesnt do anything yet, nobody finds it itchy. Theyre not using it. So you dont get volunteers.
This post doesn't blame Python, rather the management philosophy:
There was no objective basis for decision-making.
It's that simple, really. Without an objective basis, there was no way to argue from anything except opinion, with nobody's opinion being more important than anyone else's.
But that post was by Philip J Eby, a die hard Python fan. However I do believe if Python was the problem, he'd say so. So then I started worrying about Python being the problem. This site seems to think it be:
Unfortunately, I'm am still left in the dark to speculate. Can large scale projects be successful implemented around a dynamic programming language? The burden of proof was out there several years ago, now more than ever, the development community needs some incontrovertible evidence that dynamic programming languages can scale.
I don't buy that. Python is a strong language. There are a ton of projects out there that fail that are using closed source tools. The list of projects using Python is long (just realised YouTube is written in Python), off the top of my head I think of the stuff Enfold and Blue Fountain have done, some of which completely kick ass.
No off to find some proof to counter this argument, but first I have to get some work done.