Why so few Python jobs?

[Ken Seehof]

> 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.
>
> Cheers
> Dave

My conclusion after seeing the ridiculous number of responses to your
previous post:  The total amount of time spent by python programmers talking
about tabs is vastly larger than the amount of time spent actually dealing
with tabs and indentation issues.  I attribute this to the fact that python
has very few flaws, so people on this list don't have much else to talk
about other than tabs. :-)

Having worked with python for years, I can say from experience that there is
no problem with indentation.  I have never encountered any bug in the real
world -ever- in python that was caused by incorrect indentation.  In fact
there's more potential for such bugs in C/C++ or Java because indentation
can be inconsistent with the programs behavior.

In python, indentation expresses blocking directly, and therefore it is not
possible for the interpreter to do anything other than what the programmer
has expressed.  As a result there are -fewer- blocking related bugs than in
languages where indentation and blocking are allowed to be inconsistent.

The indentation paranoia among non-python programmers is misplaced.  In any
case, it's certainly not rational to select a language on the basis of such
absurdly trivial theoretical issues.  Ask your engineers what they estimate
the overall increase in the bug rate would be due to supposed indentation
issues.  Let's say it's 1.0% (a ridiculously high estimate: I'd put it at
about -0.02%).  Do they really think it matters?

- Ken