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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

Eschewing newer technologies in general is clearly a terrible idea but it's not such a bad idea to eschew hyped technologies (particularly corporate driven hype).

Python is an example of a technology that grew relatively slowly and without a hype cycle.

IME hype in this industry correlates pretty strongly with crap.

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That is true, but the trick is how to separate the hype from the gold, which is almost as much superstition as science. I would disagree that Python didn't have a hype phase; there were comics like this[1] after all.

[1] https://xkcd.com/353/

Although I would say 2007 was close to the peak of Python bleeding "mindshare" due to the hype cycle of Ruby and Rails.

Very little money was ever spent hyping Python.

Python benefited enormously by contrast to Perl, despite being slower.

That's a function of when Python was popularized, where there was very little major corporate support for new open source libraries / frameworks. Ruby and Rails had their hype cycle around the same time, more or less on the back of a <50 employee company.

Nowadays, open source development has centralized far more on large public companies, so there's a lot more marketing effort being put on all the languages / frameworks / libraries out there.

If you look at the Google trends for ruby on rails (where the hype is clear) it looks markedly different to python (steady trend).

I remember that comic - I think it coincided not with anything special happening in the python world, it was just when Randall Munroe learned python.

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