[matt_m]

I think the main example in the article is talking about incompatible types, not global variables, so the issues apply more or less the same in any language (Java, Python, C++, etc), since there is generally no guarantee that one version of a library can work with objects of another version of a library at run time (since the private fields may be different between the two versions).

There's a brief note on singleton problems, so that might be an issue with code that uses them more, but the example given (listening on port 80) is also more or less language independent, since there is only one port 80 whether your code uses singletons or not.