The committee that heads it and sets policy has 5 members. It has hundreds of employees. This is comparable to other key commissions like the Federal Election Commission.

And to think, it’s still funny all these millions of years later.

If Lemmy does become more of an organization, it would be nice to have a level of public assurance over any control exerted by the organization. A lot of people see that the lead developers of Lemmy are communist and shy away from it based merely on that. I have one of the oldest accounts on Lemmy, I’ve seen plenty of them, and my impression is that they have conducted themselves with only the utmost ethics. However, it can still help newcomers who don’t want to feel like someone might be breathing down their neck.

All of this is very true! But it’s has to stack up against the large amount of experience with Python, both personally and in the industry. I have had to make decisions on project languages with an eye towards the abilities not just of myself, but of other people on my team. Fortunately, someone who knows Rust recently transferred onto my team, so we may do a project in Rust soon.

I would be torn between Python and Rust.

The case for Python is that I’m already very experienced in it (nearly 20 years), there’s a good job market out there for it, and the ecosystem is one of the best in existence. It’s like a comfortable well made jacket, maybe a tad worn in some areas but very functional. And it’s not standing still, with a community that’s committed to constant improvement.

Rust is more fun. I like the way it’s been put together. It can also be used in more areas. There are some niches (wasm, low level, kernel) where Python just doesn’t work. It has been able to benefit from the years of mistakes from Python and other languages on things like how it handles Unicode strings. I don’t know it as well as Python, but I barely get a chance to work with it so that could change quickly in time.

It’s also good to have multiple compilers to exercise the spec.