Why so few Python jobs?

[William Park]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 08:48:05PM +0100, Dave Swegen wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 11:25:22AM -0400, David Lees wrote:
> > My small company now has about 8 software engineers and an equal number
> > of hardware types.  I have found a lot more interest in Python among the
> > hardware types (FPGA, board layout..) than the software types.  The
> > software engineers almost all know perl and I have been in a constant
> > battle to be allowed to use Python.  It is a chicken and egg issue that
> > boils down to maintenance of deliverables and inertia.  I come from the
> > optics/engineering world rather than computer science and picked Python
> > on my own as a prototyping tool (I don't know perl).  If schools start
> > using Python in big numbers, perhaps the popularity issue will be
> > solved.
> 
> At my workplace python is viewed with extreme suspicion by the
> software engineering people for one simple reason: They're extremely
> suspicious of the indentation issue (see my earlier post on this).
> Apart from that they think it seems like a fine language. Ho hum. I'll
> get there in the end.

Also, don't discount human nature...  Your colleagues are not going to
embrace something that will make them obsolete.  I would think argument
about indentation is just pretext used to mask self-interest.

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
8 CPU cluster, (Slackware) Linux, Python, LaTeX, Vim, Mutt, Sc.