Using Python for processing of large datasets (convincing managment)

[Alex Martelli]

Thomas Jensen wrote:
        ...
> Oh, I thought Zope was "just" a product.

It's a product.  Not sure what the "just" means here.

> Google and Fidelity, nice! (Do you have any links regarding this?)

Look at Google's own site, where they list job prospects, to see
Python as a prereq for some job positions.

About Fidelity, I think you may want to contact ReportLabs -- it's
their customer, after all, I only know about it because it was
mentioned at Europython recently.


>> Point 3 is troublesome if taken literally -- I know of NO language
>> claiming 99.999% freedom from defects for its implementations.
> 
> I'm sorry I didn't make myself clear (in Denmark usually 5 nines means
> uptime or accesability for web services). Actually I belive we "only"
> guarantee 99,99% to our customers :-)

That's quite another issue, and mostly related to setting up redundance
suitably (no single point of failure).  And one in ten thousands IS much
more reasonable / achievable than one in a hundred thousands.

> I belive the concern was more about Python taking down our servers and
> thereby ruining our uptime (we have a load balancing unit, so both
> servers had to go down).

No reason to think that's any more likely than with any other
programming language.  We're talking about a language that's been
around for over ten years, after all, not a "new kid on the block".

> Having used Python quite a bit, I known that wouldn't happen but 2
> people saying it is better than one :-)
> 
> I've worked a lot with MS tools professionally and must say that my view
> of MS have gone from bad to worse. Visual Basic is by far the worst,
> most clumsy and buggy computer language I've ever used. I've come to
> really hate that language. The only "good" thing about it, is that it's
> so closely bound to COM, that COM components are really easy to make.
> Don't even get me started about the stability of using IIS for SOAP
> servers :-(

I won't.  But -- any opinion on the VB7, aka VBNET, release?  On paper
it looks better than VB6 (it should -- they made two dozen incompatible
changes, each taking it a bit closer to Python:-) but I have no idea
about the reliability of the implementation, not having yet had to use it.


Alex