State of Python

[Ganesan R]

>>>>> "Anand" == Anand Pillai <pythonguy at Hotpop.com> writes:

>  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.

I agree that Python usage is not as widespread as Perl. Unfortunately, 
it's unlikely to get advertised even where it is used, so there is
no easy to way to measure usage. We use python and jython in our
project internally.

>  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.

You're in luck :-). O'Reilly India has published the Indian edition of Alex
Martelli's "Python in a Nutshell". While it's still not carried in local
bookstores, I was able to order online at http://www.cb-india.com/ and get
it delivered in Bangalore without problems.
 
>  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.

Same story here. I have had a few quick converts to python because of jython
(we use Java extensively) and because of pexpect :-). 

> 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.

Oh, it's not that bad. People are willing to learn if you show them a
practical use for the tool. In my University days I had a lot of converts to
emacs just because of syntax highlighting and the ability to jump to the
correct source line where there is a syntax error in compiling. 

Ganesan

-- 
Ganesan R (rganesan at debian dot org) | http://www.debian.org/~rganesan/
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