[portland] django coders?

[Jeff Rush]

Rami Kassab wrote:
> Jeff, was mainly referring to marketing itself better to developers. While
> we work to get our clients to agree to having Python development, it's not
> something that our clients come asking us to do right off the bat.

It is an interesting issue but I think you're in conflict ;-) with
Dylan's viewpoint:

Dylan Reinhardt wrote:
>> Rami Kassab wrote:
>>> Nonetheless, Dylan is very correct. Python needs to market itself
>> better!!!
>
> Our community leaders may be composed of software geniuses, but they
> suffer from a serious case of not-getting-it when it comes to
> marketing.  They very strongly do not want to discuss anything
> beyond objective technical merit and don't think it makes any sense
> to design python.org to reach outside the F/OSS community.

Rami, you say we should market better to developers but it is precisely
(senior) developers who care primarily (not exclusively) about
"objective technical merit" in choosing a language.  That and finding
someone to pay them to use their favorite language but as you and others
here say, there is already strong demand, just not much supply.

I use the word 'senior developer' above because they have more influence
over the language within an organization than a junior developer.
Juniors use whatever language their team uses.

There is a third group of developers, sort of orthogonal to the above,
of those who use whatever language is popular in order to be employed,
with little loyalty to a language community and often not a super-deep
understanding of the intricacies of a language.  To them it is just a
tool.  Abusing a cliche, they code to live instead of living to code.
Getting more of them to use Python means convincing them it will put
money in their pocket.  There are those in the Python community who
don't want to attract that kind of developer.  They feel they will (1)
lower the quality of programming done with Python, (2) dilute the sense
of community and (3) reduce the wages that can be earned by using a
language with high demand and low supply.

Some companies align themselves with this viewpoint and are hesitant to
promote Python too much, at the risk of losing their secret weapon,
their competitive advantage.  Python is an easy language to learn.

The cost, for both these companies and the developers above favoring
exclusivity, is fewer opportunities for filling employment positions.
If Python is not widely used as other languages, it is harder to find
developers to hire and harder for developers to find suitable employers.
 Balancing that cost against higher revenue is tricky.

Now marketing to managers or executives is a different matter but no one
here seems to be saying we need to do more of that.

-Jeff