[Python-Dev] Re: Re: 2.4 news reaches interesting places

[Stephan Deibel]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Carlos Ribeiro wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 20:36:45 -0500, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> > Actually, there's another problem in the corporate world that has
> > nothing to do with Python's performance (at least not directly).  When a
> > manager has to hire 25 programmers for a project they think to
> > themselves, "well, Java programmers are a dime a dozen so I'll have no
> > problem finding warm bodies if we write it in Java.  Can I even /find/
> > 25 Python programmers?"
> 
> You're right, specially for big corporations. But in the end, we're
> just running in circles: it's hard to get new programmers to learn
> Python, partly because it's in low demand, and partly because the
> language has an totally undeserved fame of being slow.

The perception-of-speed issue is clearly important but we're definately
not running in circles.  There are quite a few signs that the Python 
user base is expanding substantially.  

For example, a September article in InfoWorld said "But the big winner
this time around is the object-oriented scripting language Python, which
saw a 6 percent gain in popularity, almost doubling last year's results."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/09/24/39FErrdev_1.html?s=feature

Also, there are companies that have hundreds of Python programmers,
like some of those that have done success stories:

http://www.pythonology.org/success

That doesn't mean the perception that you can't hire 25 at once isn't
a problem, but clearly some companies know that turning someone into
a Python programmer is easy enough to offset the smaller available pool.

To counter speed claims, look at articles like this one:

http://www.pythonology.org/success&story=suzanne

"Python helps AFNIC manage over 10,000 internet domain name registration 
requests per minute in a landrush for the ".fr" top-level internet domain"

Yes it would be nice to have more of these, where performance is mentioned
in the summary!  Please contact me if you can contribute one.

BTW, I can't resist my own favorite speed anecdote:  I once wrote a
one-off script to process down a couple of gigabytes of variously
fragmented web logs into month-by-month files.  I thought I was being
naive doing f.readline() in a for loop with some date parsing code for
each entry.  But I was completely astounded how fast it processed -- and
it just worked the first time around.

- Stephan