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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on A corpus of our community's knowledge - Less Wrong
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One problem is that changes to the codebase seem to be going very slowly. We need Python-literate volunteers in order to start taking on complicated jobs like, say, adding a Wiki element to each post where the discussion can be summarized.
It would be easy to set up a parallel MediaWiki, announce it in a post, and develop a habit to link there whenever appropriate, from posts and comments on this portal.
I wonder if it would be quicker to port the codebase from Python than to find people willing to code in Python.
ETA: I just realized this reads like a jab. I was being serious.
Your impression is very different from mine: if my primary goal on a project was to attract developers I would write it in Python.
Very unlikely. First, any solution that involves rewriting substantial amounts of code is a priori highly unlikely to be a "quicker" solution than most other sane options.
Second, Python is somewhere in the neighborhood of the 6th or 7th most popular programming language in current use, and many languages of comparable or greater popularity are either painfully lacking in expressive power (C, Java) or detrimental to competent programming (PHP, Visual Basic, Java).
Overall, Python is reasonably close to an ideal language for these purposes, with respect to the metrics of expressivity, sanity, and popularity.
Hell no. Any decent OO/imperative programmer can quickly pick up any decent OO/imperative language, and the sort of code monkey who can't ought not to be let near Less Wrong.
There's a difference between not being able to work in Python, versus not being willing to work in Python. C, perl, ruby, php, even Java would be more appealing to me than touching Python with a ten-foot pole.
Also, presumably you want proficient developers working on the codebase. There's a difference between being able to pick up Python when you have to, versus understanding Python idioms and coding efficiently and bug-free.
ETA: this is getting WAY off-topic, and so I won't continue this thread. If you're interested in why someone wouldn't like Python, there are fires from the holy wars visible clearly from Google that you can go investigate.
Why do you dislike Python so much?
You may not be a statistically significant sample :)
I for one do all my personal projects in Python, so I would prefer it to most of the languages you mentioned. Python is totally awesome :D
This week I forked the lesswrong codebase, installed all the needed dependencies and tried to get it to run. I still haven't succeeded (it seems it can't find psycopg een though I installed it, this morning before going to work I was fiddling around with PYTHONPATH). I will get it working in the near future and start working on it.
(pjeby, another commenter here, is a major Python guru, though I don't know if he plans to contribute)