Could you provide some examples? Without having had that experience, I’m having trouble picturing a concrete example that I would be sure is of the same kind.
Nginx is probably my fav of the surviving-and-thriving ones. It still remains very distinct from Apache, but calling it simpler would be a large stretch.
Projects like qmail discovered the reason in a somewhat _harder_ manner. And yes, I'd argue Python is yet another case, as it grew _at least_ as complex as Perl.
Haha, what was that quote? Something like, any language is going to iterate towards a crappy version of lisp.
Greenspun's Tenth Rule[0]
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. - Philip Greenspun
How would you subvert Greenspun in large codebases without Common Lisp? I once used Drools the rules engine which used a dynamic scripting language on Java objects. Python could have replaced that language, with much better tooling, errors etc.
Could you have written that system in a mix of Java and or another scripting language such as JRuby[0]?
Doesn't mean nothing good comes out of them, and if it's simplicity that motivates people then eh, I'll take it, but gosh darn the cycle is a bit grating by now.