Sylvan (referenced as main guru in the link) is still an active member of the Pony community and he's contributing on a regular basis. His most recent commit that was merged to master was yesterday:

https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/commit/eaf1dcd525c691feae1...

The Pony development community is still relatively small but we make good regular progress. We all wish the community was bigger and we were progressing more quickly but that is always going to be the case.

We have a regular weekly development Zoom call that is open to the public. Feel free to join. Info is available in the Pony development groups.io group: https://pony.groups.io/g/dev/calendar.

If you join the development list, you'll also get access to the recordings of the sync meeting going back close to a year. There's a wealth of info there for anyone cares to dig in. Probably more than anyone would care to ever listen to.

Sylvan is busily working with his team on the feature for distributed actors at Microsoft Research.

* Type-system for machine specific data (local vs foreign actors, e.g file descriptors, ...)

* Node failure

* Distributed GC (pointer identity => random id)

* Distributed work-stealing (CNF-ACK protocol, user-specific scheduler rules: moving cost, ...)

There's also more work going for more formal proofs.

Here is a bit of explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIziz1c41ww

"Development status: Everything we talked so far is real and is in use. Runs on everything from a Raspberry PI to 4096 core SGI Windows OSX Linux FreeBSD Performance is competitive with C/C++, often better as core counts go up"

Esp. the last 10 slides.

Having tracked Pony for a while and started using it more heavily over the last several months - I would say the Quora quote is pretty wrong and short sighted. As per SB's comment the original developers are still involved. From my perspective as a user the additions to the team have helped fill out gaps and kept momentum going (especially when the original team needed to focus elsewhere for a while).

Certainly as the new community members have stepped up the nature and style of the community has been influenced and evolves and not everyone has necessarily liked those changes (as per Quora comments) but I think the language has benefitted.

Languages, like operating systems - are often identified with the original designers - but it takes a community to grow it and ensure continued growth. Pony's community is still small but folks are actively contributing to Pony's growth and maturity. The language still has a long way to go but its fun to use and its got some interesting ideas that are worth exploring.