Business issues regarding adapting Python

[Krishnakant]

On Sun, 2009-09-27 at 00:13 -0700, Nash wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> Salam Valicum.
I am Krishnakant from Mumbai India and in our country case was exactly
the same but now pritty different in just a matter of few years.
I have answered your queries inline with your questions so read on. 
> I'm a big time python fan and it has helped me write code fast and
> push it out quickly. We have a medium sized telecom product written
> 90% in Python and 10% in Java. The problem is, in the place where we
> work (Pakistan), we can't find Python developers. I asked HR to send
> me figures on how many people do we have available who have worked
> with C++, Java, PHP and Python with 2-3 years of experience. They did
> a search on available candidates on Pakistan's biggest jobsite and
> this is what they sent:
> <snip>
> Almost no-one shows up with Python experience when we put out a job
> opening and now it is becoming a real hurdle. Despite our liking and
> cost savings with the language, we are thinking about shifting to
> Java.

Well, As I said this was a case in India just a few years back.
But now we pritty well find programmers in languages like python or ruby
or php.  The main reason for such growth in the number of python
programmers is the awareness people like myself create amongst the
masses of new computer programmres.
Moreover the industry itself is slowly realising the time and resulting
cost saving by making use of python.


> 1. Have any of you faced a similar issue? How did you resolve it?
I currently lead the development of an accounting software called
GNUKhata ( http://gnukhata.gnulinux.in ) which is totally developed in
python.
Let me tell you that none of the developers working on this project were
python programmers.
It took me about 15 days to train them till intermediate level.  The
trick here is to take good programmers who have good logical sence and
have the fundamental idea of programming in some other language.  For
example the coordinator of this project knew .net pritty well and today
she is a much better python programmer than me.
> 2. Do you think it makes sense to hire good programmers and train them
> on Python?
Exactly.  Look at my anser to your question number 1.
> 3. If we do train people in Python for say a month; are we just
> creating a team of mediocre programmers? Someone who has worked with
> Python for over an year is much different than someone who has worked
> with Python for only a month.
Firstly, that's true with all programming languages.  Whether you will
create good efficient programmers in python depends on how well you use
my trick of taking good programmers proficient in any other language,
and yes they should be open to learning new languages.
May I repeat, including GNUKhata, the accounting software I lead, all
the projects I worked on, we hardly had python programmres.  But we
trained them by making them do porting work and also do some bug fixing.
So the other hack is that you make the new python programmres port the
code from let's say some module in Java.  Now if you hire java
programmers and decide to train them in python for example, then this
trick works very well because they alredy know the language of the
source module and now portint it to python.

Now due to many such projects being done in huge companies in India, we
have a good repository of python programmers.
Remember that popularity of a programming language directly depends on
how much you involve the programmers.

> 4. Any suggestions or idea? Related posts, articles etc would
> certainly help!
> I think you can find that your self.

> I know that going Java will probably mean a 3x increase in the number
> of people that we have and require time for Python component
> replacement with Java ones. But for Business Continuity sake,
> management doesn't mind.
> 

Well, If you take my words as coming from an experienced person, I
highly recommend you to believe in what your inner feelings say about
this decision.
If you feel python will svae cost and time then just go ahead and train
programmers in python.  From your own experience you might have realised
that trainning people in python for a month will be not as bad as
trainning new programmers in java for a month.
I mean the learning curve is very very narrow in python.

Khuda Hafiz.
Krishnakant.