Python is, of course, ubiquitous among startups and west coast tech companies; it is basically Startup Java.
I don't see us stopping using Python any time soon and not just for the legacy factor and cost of switching. It has its place, and Go has its shortcomings, and together they make a nice balance.
BTW we'd also love to move to Python 3 because of Unicode issues, but currently we have so many 3rd party libraries that are Python 2.7 only, that it's not feasible.
I see what you mean. Also, presumably those that didn't switch, that use and love Python, are not very compelled to write a "We are still staying with Python" blog.
And I think they should. Marketing and perception is important.
I used to stick up for Python 3 on HN and other places but I've given up. I have no interest in converting people going to Go. And no matter what Python (or any other language) does, they are going to lose users to JavaScript.
Also, my experience is that people who feel passionate about Python 2.x will shout down people who are using Python 3 with "nobody uses Python 3." Who has time for that?
When I have seen people talking about sticking with Python 2, its either because A) why bother I don't need to B) a specific library is not Python 3 yet.
If nothing else It'd illustrate clearly either the python 3 folks haven't got a leg to stand on (unable to come up with any tangible real life [reason]) or that there are actually compelling reasons to swap over to python 3; in which case we can point people to those posts in threads like this.
(personally I forayed into 3 but couldn't find any [reason] to stay there; I keep dropping into threads like this hoping to find one...)
http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3102/
Like I said, it's a small reason, but it would have made my life much easier today. Enough small reasons add up.
I always thought of Python as being a great utility programming language. It's not really a specialist, more of a jack of all trades.
For example PHP is all about web development. Ruby is probably most well known for Rails and also widely used for web development. Python is widely used for web development, but that's not necessarily the first thing you think of for Python.
What's going to keep any programming language alive is the libraries that become so well entrenched that a competing library would have a serious uphill battle to even come close to matching functionality. Python has a lot of libraries like this for scientific tools.
I'm always skeptical to hear that a developer has moved from X programming language to Go. I wonder how many of these tales are from developers who are actually referring to what they do in their spare time rather than their day jobs. Go is still early enough that doing the sorts of things which create the most jobs is still more painful than it needs to be (and so you would probably be doing these things in a different ecosystem.) It seems that the real Go job generating stories are from start-ups which have hit some momentum, received funding and are rewriting parts of their stack in Go.
The mass job generators are still at the Rails / Django / PHP / JS levels.