Python in the enterprise: Pros and cons

[mksql at yahoo.com]

"The Cons:" 

"Smaller pool of Python developers compared to other languages, such as Java" 

Some commercial tool vendors, who have thousands of developers, still have bugs
in their products that are many years, and product versions, old. It is not the
size of your developer base that is important, it is how you use it. 

"Absence of a commercial support point, even for an Open Source project (though
this situation is changing)" 

Perl, Apache? Lack of a singluar commercial support entity does not seem to have
hurt them. With most popular open source tools, support of a variety of types
can be found. The thing with Python (and Perl, etc.) is that you do not have to
pay for support, unless you really want to. 

Funny thing is, the support thing seems to get brought up so often, that I
believe that it's importance is somewhat inflated. In my experience, support for
a language is not nearly as critical is it may be for a commercial database
system, for example. If my code does not work, I can re-write it in a way that
it will work, to work around a language implementation flaw. In over a decade of
developing software, I can recall a single instance where _commercial_
programming language support was needed - and it was not for an open source
language. Anyone care to guess who the vendor of the language product was? 

"Software performance (though benchmarks repeatedly demonstrate Python is
comparable to Java in most applications)" 

Then why is this a problem? Java is very obvious in Enterprise level
envrionments. Thus if in "most" situations, if Python performance is comparable
to Java, and Java's performance is accepted, should not Python's? 


There will always be a segment of the market who will choose their tools based
on how many other people use them (sheep), and not be concerned on how suited to
the task or efficient the tools are. Some of us prefer to be the wolves.

 
On 10 Jul 2002 14:02:33 -0700, sarah.fraser at cnet.com (builder) wrote:

>Python has many fans in the open source community, but is it ready for
>the enterprise? Here are the advantages and disadvantages of using
>Python in the corporate environment.
>http://builder.com.com/article.jhtml?id=u00420020709DGS01.htm