python a bust?

[Alex Martelli]

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
   ...
> It is still not a good sign.  If Python is so easy, and it were also
> popular, then presumably people would write problem specific books "in
> Python."  Do your website in Python, your database in Python, your game in
> Python, your AI in Python, your laundry in Python...

Yes, there's quite a few of those -- "Game Programming with Python"
(by Sean Riley) came out last month, "Game Programming With Python, 
Lua, and Ruby" (by Tom Gutschmidt) should be out any day now, "Text
Processing in Python" (by David Mertz) has been out for months,
"Python Web Programming" (by Steve Holden) and "Web Programming
in Python) (by George Thiruvathukal, Thomas Christopher, John Shafaee)
even longer, and similarly for other popular "specific areas" such
as XML processing.

Still, book-publishing is an "interesting" activity -- and stocking
bookstore shelves even more so.  A purely anecdotal datum I just
learned about, for example: smack in the heart of downtown Milan there 
are two excellent, large bookstores which are always hotly competing.
Somebody was looking for "Python in a Nutshell" at one of them and
complained on an Italian Python list that they had no copies at all
on the shelves; somebody else replied, quite perplexed, that the
_other_ of the two bookstores had _five_ copies on _its_ shelves...

...and unless you get friendly enough with the store's personnel to
chat about such issues, it's gonna be hard to learn whether one store
is cursing and swearing for wasting such shelfspace for a book which just 
is not moving, or the other is desperate for more copies of a book it
has run out of...:-)

Personally, I think my (admittedly risible:-) "googling survey" is
a more accurate gauge of a language's popularity than eyeballing the
variety or abundance of titles about it at one or a few bookstores;-)


Alex