Python Popularity: Questions and Comments

[Brad Bollenbach]

"Steve Holden" <sholden at holdenweb.com> wrote in message
news:HOqY7.25744$a56.10288 at atlpnn01.usenetserver.com...
> <brueckd at tbye.com> wrote in message
> news:mailman.1009474351.12838.python-list at python.org...
> > On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, A. Keyton Weissinger wrote:
> >
> > > If it is as "X" as we all say/know/feel-in-our-hearts that it is, why
is
> > > there so very little real commercial appeal? Why are there not
> industrial
> > > strength application servers being based on Python? Why are there not
> big
> > > public companies trying to sell products that improve upon Python in
all
> its
> > > Python-ness? Why is company X not moving all their dreck
> VB/COBOL/PL/1/etc
> > > code onto Python instead of investing the huge amount of
> > > money/time/resources into moving it to Java?
> >
> > To me, the fact that so many people are moving to Java at all means that
a
> > lot of times those decisions have little to do with technology and lots
to
> > do with hype (more favorably termed "momentum"). IMO Python *is* going
the
> > direction you hope, and it is getting there at the right pace.

I think Steve is giving too much credit to those who make the decisions.
It's not so much about "hype" as it is that (truly and sadly) the people
that make the most important decisions about which tools will be used to
construct a given piece of software in a company are often the ones that
know the least about them (I come from a Powerbuilder shop, I know this
very, very well).

In short, they're pretty stupid. See http://www.dilbert.com for examples of
that.

If the decisions were put in the hands of people that knew how to make them,
Python would be considerably more popular (I personally would use it in my
day job if I were /allowed/, and I do for small make-my-life-easier types of
programs), as would Perl, and Java would probably still just be thought of
as a different kind of coffee.

But, just because you don't use it at work, doesn't mean it can't make your
life easier at home and for playing around. Use Python because it makes YOUR
life easier, not because somebody told you it was supposed to. Popularity is
of little concern when one desires to be lazy (who cares if everybody's
using Java, if I know that I want to use Python because it's a lot easier
for people with human-sized brains to use?).

If you're concerned about popularity of a language, this suggests that
you're also concerned about marketability. If this is true, then it goes
without saying that you'll do much better to invest your time learning Java
or Visual Basic. (Search www.dice.com for salaries being offered for
programmers in these languages to see what I mean. There are a few orders of
magnitude more positions available for a VB or Java programmer, than for a
Python programmer.)


Brad