Article of interest: Python pros/cons for the enterprise

[Aaron Watters]

On Feb 25, 8:29 am, Nicola Musatti <nicola.musa... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And the migration to Python is due in large part because of an
> > additional factor of 3-4x in personal productivity (over Java).
> > Improvements in runtime performance wouldn't hurt, but for many
> > applications that's not an issue.  (If optional data typing were
> > offered, Python's penetration in the enterprise space would be even
> > higher, and I suspect there would be performance gains as well.)
>
> This I found less hard to believe. Python is more expressive than Java
> and usually requires less code for the same task. Moreover the
> availability of libraries is comparable.

I tend to cheat when I code in java and pretend
I'm writing in Python.  But even then the biggest
pain comes in when I try to use really advanced
data structures and get all knotted up in the verbosity
-- and when I try to figure out what I was doing later
it's even worse.  For example in Python I tend to build
things like dictionaries of tuples to lists of
dictionaries without thinking about it, but in Java
the equivalent of

   D[ (x,y) ] = [ { a: b } ]

is too horrible to be imagined, even if you cheat
and use the non-type-safe containers.  Of course
this is in addition to other Java annoyances like
no proper support for multivalued returns or
function pointers, and overgeneralized
libraries.

However, I have found in the corporate
environment that managers frequently don't
like it when you do in a few days that
things that they themselves don't know how
to do in less than several months.  Especially
when it makes the other programmers angry.
Sometimes I think programmers should get
sociology/psychology/poli.sci degrees and pick up the
programming stuff on the job, since most of
what counts seems to be politics, really.

  -- Aaron Watters

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