[python-advocacy] New python products supported?

[Jeff Rush]

Michael March wrote:
> 
> First, I want to correct/amend what I said about 'never heard of
> Python'. Pretty much the case is that at the very least someone has
> vaguely heard of it but it ends there. The next step up from that is
> "its a scripting language like Perl", etc.

Hmm, I'm wondering how we can raise the visibility of Python in those 
particular levels of IT.  Michael, in your world, how do those decision 
makers, not line-developers, become aware of tools?  Do they listen to 
technical podcasts?  Just read InfoWorld?  Get taken to lunch a lot by 
vendors?  Are they swayed primarily by case histories or by cool abstract 
technology?

Do we need to get brief whitepapers or, for those short on time, more 
screencasts suitable for certain classes of people?  Slanted to talking head 
case histories or comparison to languages they do know, or something a bit 
more abstract like commonly encountered mid-level problems and how Python 
solves those easily?  At showmedo.com a good selection of screencasts are 
collecting but many are more for the in-the-trenches developer and not so much 
about programming philosophy, leverage and scope.

I say mid-level problems above because low-level ones are cool to impress your 
programmer friend with, using trick expressions, but I don't think they 
impress decision makers.  And high-level problems may be too abstract, more 
like choosing an entire web framework, a vendor or family of products.  You'd 
have to match their industry focus quite well to make it work.

Mid-level problems would be about commonly-encountered things like user 
authentication techniques, wrapping a database in DB-API or ORM, structuring a 
large body of code for collaboration, a good overview of unit/functional 
testing in Python, using docstrings/introspection to generate the bulk of your 
developer docs.  Maybe even a bit more abstract, like how a framework like 
D-BUS uses decorators and metaclasses to annotate and invisibly proxy 
libraries and an in-depth demonstration of the ctypes module to show how 
Python can wrap their world very easily.

And I presume the problem isn't the availability of people, training and 
books, because it sounds like you're saying they aren't even at that point yet.

-Jeff