[BangPypers] Regarding Python popularity

[Noufal Ibrahim]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Srinivas Reddy Thatiparthy
<srinivas_thatiparthy at akebonosoft.com> wrote:
> 1.The other day my friend was saying ;Since python is opensource ,

The fact that Python is open source is orthogonal to the fact that it
compiles source into bytecode which can be decompiled. Also "Python"
can't be open source. "Python" is a programming language. A concrete
implementation (eg. CPython) can be open source.

By your logic, "C" is opensource (in it's gcc incarnation) and
therefore should also suffer from the reverse engineering problem
you're raising.

> so
> many companies fear that their product's byte code
> could be reverse engineered.To protect  their Intellectual Property
> rights they stay away from python,
> is it true?

My previous employer used http://cx-freeze.sourceforge.net/ to compile
their python programs into standalone executables. I don't know how
'secure' this is but it's similar to the kind of security you get
through compilation.

> 2.What hinders python from becoming  a popular OOP language,like a
> Java,C#,C++?
> is it just slowness of python or dynamic language or Marketing?
> I would like to know .

This is subjective. I personally think it's mainly marketing (Java had
Sun and C# had MS). This leads to secondary effects like
certifications (which are useful for non-tech hiring managers to
evaluate potential employees), availability of 'resources' (since most
engineering grads jump onto the now popular language in the hope of
getting a job)

The increased adoption also helped the language. More mature tools
were built etc. so it comes around.

Also, people tend to think of Python as  a 'scripting' language and
therefore not suitable for 'enterprise' products which by definition
should be hard to understand and convoluted - lots of patterns and
layers of abstraction and lots of people working on it at any given
time.

Python's speed is also a matter but I think that's not as big a factor
as the marketing.


-- 
~noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in