Do not worry ,still breathing here , when I started Fortran,RPGII and Cobol was the thing and Python did not exist. Now Python is becoming the old elephant and new languages like Nim will evolve and they will grow an ecosystem over time.

It's undeniable that some new languages will supplant the current bunch (except possibly for C; this thing might well be unkillable by this point). But I don't see any particular reason why it would be Nim.

C might be killable if the hardware significantly changes at some point, leading to systems languages better suited to handling that hardware.

I'm curious what the ecosystem for Python looked like in ~1999. Did it show signs of having the ecosystem it has now in those years?

I'm certain that almost everyone dismissed it due to its syntax (there are still people out there that dismiss it because of that).

I actually used Python commercially in 1999.

The "killer app" then was an app server + document store called Zope.

Things were smaller than today, but Python was already gaining popularity for scripting. Circa 2001 or so it also had good Gtk and Qt bindings -- there were even some KDE-inspired satellite commercial companies catering to Python/QT.

The discussions in Python land then were about the mythical Python 3000 -- the next, re-imagined version of Python that would fix issues, etc. That was eventually Python 3.

Perl was still king for scripting/admin stuff but losing momentum, and Ruby was mentioned as a nice alternative to Python, but with much smaller use at the time (and even today I think).

> what the ecosystem for Python looked like in ~1999

Very small. The language was not popular and many people claimed a community project could not overtake languages backed by companies. Same for the Linux kernel.

Thank you for supporting my point. However, based on your nickname I wouldn't be surprised if you were a little biased :)

I would actually love to read some forum/mailing list posts about this. If anyone has any links handy (or knows where to find them) then please post them.