On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Carlos Ribeiro wrote: > On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 20:36:45 -0500, Barry Warsaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Actually, there's another problem in the corporate world that has > > nothing to do with Python's performance (at least not directly). When a > > manager has to hire 25 programmers for a project they think to > > themselves, "well, Java programmers are a dime a dozen so I'll have no > > problem finding warm bodies if we write it in Java. Can I even /find/ > > 25 Python programmers?" > > You're right, specially for big corporations. But in the end, we're > just running in circles: it's hard to get new programmers to learn > Python, partly because it's in low demand, and partly because the > language has an totally undeserved fame of being slow.
The perception-of-speed issue is clearly important but we're definately not running in circles. There are quite a few signs that the Python user base is expanding substantially. For example, a September article in InfoWorld said "But the big winner this time around is the object-oriented scripting language Python, which saw a 6 percent gain in popularity, almost doubling last year's results." http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/09/24/39FErrdev_1.html?s=feature Also, there are companies that have hundreds of Python programmers, like some of those that have done success stories: http://www.pythonology.org/success That doesn't mean the perception that you can't hire 25 at once isn't a problem, but clearly some companies know that turning someone into a Python programmer is easy enough to offset the smaller available pool. To counter speed claims, look at articles like this one: http://www.pythonology.org/success&story=suzanne "Python helps AFNIC manage over 10,000 internet domain name registration requests per minute in a landrush for the ".fr" top-level internet domain" Yes it would be nice to have more of these, where performance is mentioned in the summary! Please contact me if you can contribute one. BTW, I can't resist my own favorite speed anecdote: I once wrote a one-off script to process down a couple of gigabytes of variously fragmented web logs into month-by-month files. I thought I was being naive doing f.readline() in a for loop with some date parsing code for each entry. But I was completely astounded how fast it processed -- and it just worked the first time around. - Stephan _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
