Bambi Meets Godzilla

Originally posted to the O'Reilly Ruby Blog late December 2005, voluntarily taken down a day later, and re-published on Steve's site after edits — written as an open reply to a commenter who accused him of bashing Python. The title borrows the 1969 short in which the fawn is annihilated the instant the monster appears, which is what it felt like to watch Java crush Smalltalk, only stretched over several years. The argument: languages do not win or lose on technical merit. They win on marketing, economics, and culture — the warmth of the community, the trajectory of adoption, the stories people tell. Steve recounts watching Smalltalk die, worries aloud that Python is dying the same way, pins part of Python's stall on a community habit of labelling differing opinions "incorrect," and detours through a Parisian-vs-Tokyo waiters analogy — a dinner anecdote about the gulf between two service subcultures — to make the point that subcultures are the product. He explains his own switch to Ruby as a bet on the warmest community and the steepest curve.

This is the cleanest early statement of the "culture eats technical merit" claim that has run under everything Steve has argued since, right up to his current position that AI transformation is a cultural problem, not a technical one. Read it against its own track record: the Ruby bet partly came good; the verdict that Python had "failed" did not.