Difficulty Finding Python Developers

[Paul Rubin]

Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> writes:
> My assertion was that you can learn enough to do useful work in a 
> weekend.  You're saying that there are situations where you need to know 
> more.  These are not mutually exclusive statements.

They're not, but the discussion was serious production projects.  I
think in order to do one successfully, you need much more than the
ability to "do useful work".  I mean, you can learn to operate a car
with 6 hours of Driver's Ed, but that doesn't make you ready to be a
professional stunt driver.

> You also pointed out that the standard Python library doesn't cover 
> every possible piece of functionality that everybody might ever need.  
> This is obviously a true statement, but it's equally true for Perl, 
> Java, TCL, C, C++, Ruby, Smalltalk, etc.  And it's a good thing, too.  
> If everything that everybody ever wanted had already been written, you 
> and me would be out of a job :-)

I don't know about Tcl, Ruby, or Smalltalk.  I've generally found that
C/C++, Perl, and Java have generally more thorough library coverage
than Python does, and also, the restrictions are more likely to be
documented and there's fewer of those little surprises.  Python may be
sort of a victim of its own success.  It was designed as a lightweight
scripting language, but its designers did such a good job with it that
people started using it for complex projects, and minor oversights and
shortcomings start turning into serious obstacles in those contexts.