State of Python

[Anand Pillai]

I think that Python is still very fledgeling in India.
 I know of only one s/w company in India that uses python
 in their programming and regularly adverties for python
 programmers. 

 In Bangalore where I work, which is supposedly the IT hub
 of India, I cannot get an O'reilly book on python from the
 major book vendors. The last time I shopped for this was
 a month ago, and the result was failure.
 
 I try to impress upon my friends about the 'agility' of the
 language, speed of learning and prototyping but has found
 the going tough. So far the best convert is one of my good
 friends, who has turned co-developer for some of my python
 projects. In India at least this is due to lack of books
 and little support for the language at the universtity/school
 level. Most indian programmers I know are averse to learning
 from the internet ( as I did  for python ) and refuse to 
 believe a language even exists, unless one can take them to
 a bookstore and point to an O'reilly/Wrox/Macmillan on the
 language sitting on the bookshelf.

  I hope this situation changes somehow.

Anand Pillai


Martin Maney <maney at pobox.com> wrote in message news:<baisul$noa$1 at wheel2.two14.net>...
> Steven Rumbalski <srumbalski at prodigy.net> wrote:
> > In all this I never thought to ask Border's staff for help.  I figure they 
> > keep all there stock on the shelves except for the stuff that needs to be 
> > replenished frequently.  I finally went out on a limb and went to the 
> > reptiles section.  
> > 
> > It wasn't there.  
> 
> <sigh>  I have really really fond memories of Borders from, uhm, I
> guess it's over a decade ago, now.  I was first introduced to Borders
> at the original storefront in Ann Arbor; a little later they opened
> what I assume were some of the first expansion locations.  For several
> years I was a regular customer of one in the Detroit suburbs (now I'm
> not sure I even recall where it was - Southfield?)
> 
> Anyway, ont he quality of implementation back then.  Maybe it was just
> luck, but the staff were almost too good to believe.  Like the time I
> was looking to pickup a coipy of _Smalltalk-80: the language and its
> implementation_, which I knew they had had a copy of.  The day I went
> in planning to part with money, I couldn't find it.  Not thinking to
> look in the reptiles section <grin>, I instead asked the nearby
> clerk... who knew the book, knew they used to have a copy, and who,
> when he'd verified that they no longer had one, pushed the button to
> reorder it.  Not because I'd promised to buy it, but because I might
> like to be bale to sit down and look it over next time I was in.
> 
> Oh yeah.  Border's used to have comfy chairs - lots of comfy chairs. 
> After all, shouldn't you be able to look over a book before deciding
> whether to buy it?  That store in Southfield (?) had decided that the
> chairs they originally got weren't comfy enough, so after about six
> months they replaced them all.  Ah, those were the days.
> 
> Oh, yes, the Smalltalk book.  Yes, of course they did have it on hand
> the next time I was in Detroit (well, we rarely went into the city
> itself, except for the occasional Breakfast with Bach at the art
> museum, but you knew what I meant, didn't you?), and in fact I bought
> it and have it here now.
> 
> > I then went to Barnes & Noble, where I found it immediately and purchased 
> > it.
> 
> The nearest B&N seems to have reduced the shelf space they give
> computer books in the last year or so, but not by as much as the
> Borders that's in the next mall over.  At this point the biggest
> selection of in-stock computer titles I know of is at Micro Center in
> ...Westmont, I think that must be.
> 
> Gah, I still miss Books'n'Bytes (a very local bookstore that was
> apparently made possible by one or more firms that did IT training and
> moved enough books through B'n'B to make their tremendous breadth of
> coverage sustainable... until it dried up).