[BangPypers] A question for us...

[Anand Balachandran Pillai]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Ramdas S <ramdas at developeriq.com> wrote:
>
> Answer is $$$ is required for funding conferences. The organizers did not
> find anyone with $$$ who has some vested interest in Python. If they had
> you'd see Python there. I you look at sponsors of the conference, you can
> map them easily to talks/topics of interest.
>
> In India for every python developer you can find 5K java developers. As a
> company CEO will you look at Python or Java, when it is not the decision
> maker who'll write the code?
>

Corporate vested interests is the reason. Sun invented java not for
evangelism or altruism but to attract a lot of developers to its pantheon
and of course to get entrenched in all kinds of computing on the
network  using Internet, the original design goal of Java.

Big companies keep doing this from time to time since investing
and standardizing on a language is often the most sureshot way to
get developers on to their platforms (but surely a very expensive way
of doing it). Microsoft did it for VB/C++ and now C# and .NET, Apple
for Obj-C and Sun for Java. Of course IBM also has a lot of investment
in Java, since though Sun invented it, IBM has made more money from it
than Sun ;-)

Open source languages not being the creation of any specific entity or
corporation don't get this kind of adoption or evangelism. Since the
underlying technology is open, there are limited pickings for a
company to take advantage (embrace/extend/extinguish) of the language
or invest millions of dollars on it to train their developers. On the
other hand closed platforms and languages can be more easily
controlled and hence investment in them often returns handsome
dividends in terms of money and/or mind share.

I liked the title of the conference - "Great Indian Developer Summit" ;-).
Somehow it produces an image of armies of uniform, robotic programmers
waiting to hear every golden word uttered from the overlords of
software world.
Quite unlike the visage of a vast open, green park with lush trees and
lazy developers siting below them with laptops, which is the image in
mind whenever I hear of a barcamp, devcamp or any other open source
conference!

>
>


-- 
-Anand