[python-advocacy] SD West

[David Beazley]

>
> My impression is that the "few dedicated individuals" are insiders to
> the various SD and Agile conferences. It's well known that the
> Pragmatic Programmers have embraced Ruby as their language of choice,
> and I'm sure part of the reason is so they can be the first to write
> and sell books about it. Also, many of the "Agile gurus" use Ruby  
> these
> days, again ditching Java (Martin Fowler comes to mind, and generally
> speaking all of the ThoughWorks guys).
>

Years ago, I attended the 1st Annual Ruby conference out of  
curiosity.  Having also attended some early Python conferences  
(IPC4), I have to say that the two conferences were vastly  
different.    The Ruby conference was co-located with the OOPSLA  
conference.  As a result, the attendees were drawn heavily from that  
community. In particular, there seemed to be a lot of Enterprise  
Computing and OO gurus in attendance.  The first Python conference I  
went to seemed to be populated by a weird mix of web-hackers,  
physicists, and lone-programmers.  Anyways, it's probably no accident  
that Ruby is showing up in the various SD conferences since many of  
Ruby's early adopters probably came out of that community to begin  
with.  I'm not sure if the lack of Python in these venues is good or  
bad though.

Cheers,
Dave