It was an interesting read, I'm not sure if they are like the shark, already dead but the message hasn't gotten to the swimming part yet, or like a harbinger of the future.
One of the things engineers are going to have to come to grips with is that you can actually be "done" doing new design. It's really really hard in FOSS stuff because bug fixing is so much less rewarding than new feature development. But programming languages are tools, and if you're familiar with tools in the physical world you realize that once you get to a certain optimum, there isn't a lot of 'new feature' to add.
The nature of tools is why a good oscilloscope or bandsaw is still a good oscilloscope or bandsaw 25 years later. It does what it needs as well now as it did when it was new. If there is some new 'space' to work in, you might need a variation of the tool, but the basic tool is fine.
Computers, and computer tools, are maturing. We've seen this in the slowing of the upgrade cycle, the resistance to change that the OP writes about, people are ok with their tools. That will be a different world of computers than we are used to I suspect.
I'm not sure if your dead shark is referring to Eve or Python 3.
I'm of two minds here. I currently work for Google. I doubt Google will ever move to Python 3. There's just too much legacy code, not enough certainty that upgrading it won't introduce bugs, and too little business reason to switch.
However, I also try to stay reasonably current on technologies available outside of Google, mostly out of paranoia that I'll end up one of those irrelevant big-company employees. And when I try to weigh all of the technology options I might use for a startup against my accumulated experience and what I want in technology infrastructure - Python 3 still stacks up fairly well. I'm not entirely certain I would use it - Go is an intriguing new option, and the non-Java JVM alternatives have gotten a lot better since I was last in the startup world in 2008. But the big changes in Python 3 - Unicode and async - have helped it stay competitive, and disciplined use of function annotations could help eliminate much of the maintenance/documentation problems of not having static typing, and it still is way beyond the competition in terms of convenient syntax and helpful abstractions.
In general tech infrastructure has about zero chance of gaining adoption in existing large enterprises, because the costs of switching are prohibitive regardless of how good it is. Companies stick with whatever was popular when they were founded, which is why Google (1998) is still a C++/Java shop, Facebook (2004) still uses PHP, and Dropbox (2007) is all Python. But that's not how new technologies get adopted. They get adopted by old companies dying off and getting replaced by new ones, and as long as tech companies continue to die (which seems a virtual certainty), there will be room for new languages and tools.
Agreed - this pulls together the ideas that maintenance is 90% of software, that Moore's Law really does appear to be ending, and that the choice of our tools is a lot less to do with "best tool for the job" and a sort of gravitational shifting between evangelists and convenience.
I have not actually met anyone who moved to 3 because 2 was not good enough or that had major issues with say unicode that they could not solve any other way.
One of the things engineers are going to have to come to grips with is that you can actually be "done" doing new design. It's really really hard in FOSS stuff because bug fixing is so much less rewarding than new feature development. But programming languages are tools, and if you're familiar with tools in the physical world you realize that once you get to a certain optimum, there isn't a lot of 'new feature' to add.
The nature of tools is why a good oscilloscope or bandsaw is still a good oscilloscope or bandsaw 25 years later. It does what it needs as well now as it did when it was new. If there is some new 'space' to work in, you might need a variation of the tool, but the basic tool is fine.
Computers, and computer tools, are maturing. We've seen this in the slowing of the upgrade cycle, the resistance to change that the OP writes about, people are ok with their tools. That will be a different world of computers than we are used to I suspect.