[BangPypers] Regarding Python popularity

[Kenneth Gonsalves]

On Monday 08 Feb 2010 4:50:07 pm Noufal Ibrahim wrote:
> > excellent answer - but you should add that choice of language and
> > platform is most often done by suits without domain knowledge and on
> > extraneous considerations[..]
> 
> The converse where 'hackers' don't understand the forces that drive
> businesses is equally (if not more) true.
> 
> Managers who manage people and are answerable to customers and have to
> worry about things like their superstar Python programmer deciding
> that the manager spoke to him the wrong way and leaving the company.
> He has to worry about being able to find talent, he has to worry about
> how much to pay the people, existing codebases and tons of other
> things that (more often than not), the 'rockstar programmer' misses
> with his purely tech driven myopic view of the real world.
> 

precisely - so managers tend to follow the herd. No doubt python is more 
secure and useful than asp or whatever - but I can hire asp guys by the 
container load, whereas python guys are more difficult to come across. And also 
cost - TCS has 50,000 java programmers - what would it cost to retrain these 
guys (if they are retrainable) to python? In short, popularity is the last 
thing one should look at when evaluating a tool (unless one is a suit)

-- 
regards
Kenneth Gonsalves
Senior Project Officer
NRC-FOSS
http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/