[calroc]

    No new features, no improvements, nothing -- just the same language, for a decade.

Am I alone in being excited by this? I am figuratively drooling over such stability.

[shitgoose]

No you are not alone. But you are minority. Majority sees the language not as a tool to solve specific problems, but as a goal, i.e. a way to chase its own tail endlessly. Hence the rudderless pursuit of new. The whole industry is in ADD mode - they moment they create something useful, they discard it and start a new quest.

[pekk]

Projects which never improve get replaced in a few years by new projects which did things better, and by other old projects which improved.

This is not ADD, this is not rudderless. This is preferring actively maintained and improved things over old crap that never gets fixed

[coldtea]

Try ANSI C then!

[raverbashing]

I heard Pascal is all the rage nowadays

Or a good, supported, still used and very stable language: Fortran.

[dragonwriter]

Fortran's most recent standard (Fortran 2008, adopted as an ISO standard in September 2010) was actually adopted more recently than the 2.7 release of Python, so, arguably, Python 2.x has been static for longer than Fortran.

(Obviously, if you said, e.g., Fortran 77, the story would be different.)

[coldtea]

Yeah. Actually, sarcasm aside, there's nothing wrong about using those languages at all.

The only pain point is Pascal's lack of a nice-sized community (and thus libraries, support for modern systems etc) nowadays.

[shitgoose]

Fortran=Math. Wherever there are projects solving math problems, they are running Fortran code. Or at best code ported from Fortran libraries.