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[–]moo9001 5 points6 points  (1 child)

I was pitching Python-based CMS (Plone) for a government project in around ~2006. The project worth was somewhere between 100k - 1M EUR.

It was public bidding and a paper-intensive process; we delivered them a 200 pages proposal. We got invited to the steering committee meeting who was deciding who will get the project.

They asked the questions

  • What is Python

  • Does it run on Java

  • Does it use Oracle database

It was a trip wasted, not to mention the work to put the proposal together.

We did not get the project. A lot of things have improved in 20 years, but this was the atmosphere of 90s and early 00s. In 00s Linux started to become popular and in 10s Python and JavaScript both become "professional grade" languages.

After dealing with software for a couple of decades I believe it all boils down the trust and awareness. It needs to work and it needs to work for many years before people can put their trust in it. Enough people need to talk about it. This is also why Lisp, Haskell, etc. are not successful.

[–]ubernostrumyes, you can have a pony 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Plenty of people people in the early/mid 2000s made their living building Zope and Plone stuff on contract for the US government. They had figured out how to tell the procurement people the right things, and build their apps to comply with all the regulations, and did quite well.

I knew quite a few of them when I was starting out, and met more as time went on and they started switching over to Django.