karies

Background upfront: I'm the guy behind the C++ interpreter and ROOT's new interfaces. I'm the co-author of the only surviving C++ reflection proposal and the author of the std::variant proposal. I have contributed to the C++ Core Guidelines (http://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines https://youtu.be/1OEu9C51K2A).

* HEP stores about 0.5 exabytes of data in ROOT format, that's almost exclusively serialized objects that do not know anything about TObject.

* XRootD is not really specific for ROOT files. A better example would maybe be our JavaScript de-serialization library, https://root.cern.ch/js/

* No way will the python binding be dropped. I wonder where you got that rumor from. About one third of our users is using it.

* HEP is limited by CPU resources, which is part of the reason why HEP decided to use a close-to-bare-metal language for the number crunching part.

* We just made the use of python and R multivariate analysis tools with ROOT data more straightforward.

* We have people from genomics etc coming to ask for help, because they cannot find a system that scales as well as ROOT does.

And then we have a different perception of the direction out there. I see that Hadoop was nice but slow, Spark is nice but slow, so now things are moving to C++, see e.g. ScyllaDB. There is no reason for us to move away from it, but every reason to make it more usable.

And yes, I agree that this is an issue. But many physicists do not.