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Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

117 replies on 8 pages. Most recent reply: Jun 15, 2007 2:29 AM by Ian Ozsvald

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Flat View: This topic has 117 replies on 8 pages [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 ... 8 | » ]

Guido van van Rossum

Posts: 359
Nickname: guido
Registered: Apr, 2003

Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come (View in Weblogs)

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 12:14 PM

Reply

Summary
I'm reposting without comments a plea for more Python marketing by John Sirbu.

Advertisement

Dear Guido,

Maybe you would like to talk about how it is important for the Python user community to post to whatever website possible to evangelize Python. A call to get INVOLVED!

Just between you and me…. I'm sick of having to read AJAX and RoR article & tutorials on digg.com/slashdot/ars technica/ and various other quasi-news sites on how this will cure all ones application development woes...

Granted some of these sites aren't very "professional" nor strictly developer oriented BUT they cater to the young and upcoming crowd of programmers and tech news junkies… Case in point...Bruce Tate came to an Atlanta Java User Group meeting touting how "the aewsome" the "R" language is.

Basically, We need more Py-users spread the faith in Python…

Please send out the call to the community to encourage more posting and discussion… Another case in point… Jython has not been updated in a while, activity is sluggish and the other "R" language in interpreted java DOES have their community behind it.

Anyways just my two cents. Thank you for your time.

-John

Sybren Stüvel

Posts: 2
Nickname: sybren
Registered: Mar, 2006

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 12:54 PM

Reply

I fully agree with John here. There is a real hype about Ruby. On the other hand, I hear that R is messy, that they are having trouble writing a bytecode compiler because of the complexity of the interpreter. There even isn't a formal definition of the language. IMO, Python has the upper hand!

I'm doing everything I can at this moment to promote the big P :)

Sybren Stüvel

Posts: 2
Nickname: sybren
Registered: Mar, 2006

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 12:55 PM

Reply

And then I read the "#1 AJAX framework" blabla in a banner on top of this page ;-)

Guido van van Rossum

Posts: 359
Nickname: guido
Registered: Apr, 2003

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 1:55 PM

Reply

How does one translate something like this into Ruby?


for f in filter(lambda f: f(-1)>=f(1),
                [lambda x:x, lambda x:x**2, lambda x:x**3]):
    for x in range(-10, 11):
        print x, f(x)

Mr Plonk

Posts: 2
Nickname: plonk
Registered: Mar, 2006

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 2:05 PM

Reply

Guido, perhaps your hiring by Google has PR value that isn't being used to best effect? A press release might have got some coverage. Or perhaps press releases for individual hirings are not appropriate, in which case it falls on the rest of us to brag about Guido, Python, & Google :-).

Guido van van Rossum

Posts: 359
Nickname: guido
Registered: Apr, 2003

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 2:07 PM

Reply

> Guido, perhaps your hiring by Google has PR value that
> isn't being used to best effect?

I blogged about it.

> A press release might have got some coverage.

Some Googlers wanted Google to issue a PR about this but it was explicitly declined by management (for the reason you state below). PRs by the PSF don't seem to have any effect whatsoever.

> Or perhaps press releases for
> individual hirings are not appropriate, in which case it
> falls on the rest of us to brag about Guido, Python, &
> Google :-).

That's the point of this blog entry, right?

Fredrik Lundh

Posts: 16
Nickname: effbot
Registered: Mar, 2005

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 2:20 PM

Reply

"How does one translate something like this into Ruby?"

How do you translate it into Python?

(duck ;-)

Mark Ramm

Posts: 404
Nickname: markramm
Registered: Mar, 2006

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 2:23 PM

Reply

I think we need to learn a lesson from the Ruby guys, they are marketing to individual developers not the enterprise. They tell stories that make it seem cool and rebellious to use Ruby.

As developers, we want to be cool, they want to have fun, and we sometimes like to stick it to "the man." Let's not allow Ruby's marketing people to position python next to Java and .net as languages that are forced on developers by the enterprise. As was apparent this last week at PyCon 2006, Python developers are smart and cool and interesting and they have a lot of fun.

I think stories about individual developers using Python to build something cool, or to change the world will do a lot better for us than another case study of "Python in the enterprise."

Josh Gilbert

Posts: 2
Nickname: jgilbert
Registered: Mar, 2006

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 2:39 PM

Reply

A very important point. I've believed this for a while; that Ruby will become more mainstream than Python due to its marketing. I don't want this to be the case, I love Python. (I'm at the sprints at PyCon at this moment, in fact.) I think that pypy has the potential to swing things in Python's favor, if enough back ends are written for it so it can target everything from LLVM to Parrot to JVM to CLR, Python would have a great deal of weight behind it due to ubiquity. It remains to be seen what will happen after the EU funding runs out.

Guido, you're a great BDFL. You make calls that end discussion so that we can move on with life. But you're not a hugely enthusiastic evangelist. Larry Wall is, and he shifted the world more with his words than his technology.

On a wholly different topic, R is a great language. It's quirky and tough to get used to, but the amount of available libraries is wonderful. It is, in my opinion, the best tool for microarray analysis, far and away superior to the vast swaths of proprietary GUI tools. I don't see Python competing as a statistical language. But there's no need to, you can use RSPython (http://www.omegahat.org/RSPython/), or RPy (http://rpy.sourceforge.net/) communicate between the two languages. It's much more pragmatic to use RPy to call CRAN packages from Python than to try and duplicate CRAN in Python.

Doug Fort

Posts: 1
Nickname: dougfort
Registered: Feb, 2003

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 3:25 PM

Reply

I find marketing programming languages to be really offensive. If we really want to push Python, we should create great things in Python. I'd like to see some books like Mark Jason Dominus' 'Higher Order Perl'.

Laurent Szyster

Posts: 4
Nickname: lavs
Registered: Aug, 2005

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 3:34 PM

Reply

Hi Guido,

Pythonic is small, quiet and unimpressive. Like a dutch
house? Pretty much. But if you look closer, you'll see
that it not just neat and clean, it is also well-done,
with method and devotion.

Belgian are a little bit like that too:

Niet klagen maar dragen an bieden vor God

Quiet and practical perfectionnists:

Pour vivre heureux vivons cachés

I blogged about CPython quiet world-domination over C# and Java. I really meant it, to the last bit. CPython is the practical next level of computer and network application development, just above C.

Before and beyond Java.

To script its ThinkPad installation, IBM uses CPython 2.2. Which is also the standard system scripting VM used by Debian GNU/Linux and the only other VM besides Microsoft's and Sun's that is supported by Nokia.

Without marketing muscle, CPython got to run everywhere.

Because it smaller and bigger, older and newer.

The sources of the CPython VM are smaller, they do more with less, which has an undeniable effect in the quality of its applications. Yet it is bigger than either C# or Java, both in API and systems supported.

The CPython VM is older than CRL or Java, and yet it is newer too: it is much closer to a Lisp interpreter than its competitors, maybe not yet there but much closer.

I blessed with the ability to come up with nice one-liners. If you google-me-up, you may find a one-liner that I wrote once. And which got successfull enough to be later used ... as spam:

"Free your software, and your ass will follow"

Sex allways makes a sale, but a cheap one. The trouble with that one-line is now that my name is associated somehow to this line and all the spam that goes allong. Including the name of my own project, which happens to be also the name of a medicine spam-marketed on the Internet. Can you see the irony?

I don't complain too much: all that semantic noise probably gives my blog a certain degree of privacy. But, now that the project is out of alpha, I came up with a better tagline than "The Semantic Web Peer" (which is as bad as correct ;-) for the real cool:

"Python on Peers"

with a nice pitch about the New Frontier of network peer application development, and the innevitable one-line question:

"Leave Ruby on Rails and let Java Sails"

and its very much self-satisfied answer:

"You Want Python on Peers"

Drop me a line if you like it, scream before I publish it if you find it terrible.

Regards,

Mal Content

Posts: 3
Nickname: malcontent
Registered: Jul, 2003

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 5:13 PM

Reply

May I suggest the following ideas.

1) Whatever you do make something like Gem. Eggs is a start but there is and has been for a very long time a need to be able to search for, install, and upgrade python libraries. Why this wasn't done five years ago is a mystery to me and everybody else who has ever used CPAN or Gem. It should duplicate all the functionality of Gem including dependency resolution. Perhaps you could leverage darwinports (better yet translate it to python!).

2) After you have done the above tell the Zope guys about it so that zope products can be installed the same say.

3) Guido, you must lay the law down and select "the one true way". I don't know if that's turbogears, or django or zope3 but as long as there are more then a dozen ways to create web sites in python the community will be scattered and will not be able to gather momentum. Ruby has very quickly decided that ROR is the one true way and it's paying off bigtime because the entire ruby development community is concentrating on making it better.

4) Solve the problems most people are having now. Configuration, deployment, testing, documentation etc. Look at rake, switchtower, migrations etc. Look at how great these projects make the life of the developer easier. Where are the python equavalents?

I guess my post can be summed up as "build a better mousetrap instead of hawking your current mousetrap". I hate to say it but until python has their CPAN, migrations, rake, switchtower, and ROR people are going to be more excited about ROR and ruby.

Guido van van Rossum

Posts: 359
Nickname: guido
Registered: Apr, 2003

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 5:16 PM

Reply

> 3) Guido, you must lay the law down and select "the one
> true way".

Ain't gonna happen. I don't know the application area well enough and, frankly, I don't care.

The Python community has to do this without my help.

Steve Orr

Posts: 2
Nickname: dbdweeb
Registered: Mar, 2006

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 5:20 PM

Reply

I like Doug Fort's comment... Right on the money.

A lot of the Ruby fame comes from Rails and a lot of the Python angst comes from the lack of something better... And the sentiment that not only do we deserve something better, there's really no excuse for the deficiency. Witness the recent "Web Frameworks Redux" discussion.

Part of the problem is frameworks that hedge you in to solutions you don't want or that try to do everything for you and make decisions for you. When you "frame" a house you are not constructing every last thing but are merely providing the "framework" on which to hang the complete product. I just want to be able to Paste (http://pythonpaste.org) diverse yet dependable stuff together and have it work. Go Pylons! (http://pylonshq.com)

The problem with "rails" are they only take you where the train goes. As a resident of the Rockies I need to go off-road. How about "Python All-Terain?"

Developers need more that just a great language. They need a solid development enviornment. Fractured solutions perpetuate a fractured community and then Bambi Meets Godzilla." http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/bambi-meets-godzilla.html

Josh Gilbert

Posts: 2
Nickname: jgilbert
Registered: Mar, 2006

Re: Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Posted: Mar 2, 2006 6:30 PM

Reply

> I like Doug Fort's comment... Right on the money.
>

Eh, you agree that marketing languages is bad and then you link to Steve Yegge? Steve actually arguing that marketing is more important than the language's quality? That's... odd.

I think Steve's right on the money, his essays are what first convinced me that Python was in trouble.

(Actually, that's not quite true. What first made me suspicious was when I was learning Python. I had been using Perl for a few years and had become accustomed to the style of the community and the quality of the books. Python doesn't have anything like the Camel book, that came as a surprise. The Camel book isn't just a chatty tutorial. It's a discussion of the language that points out good and bad parts as it teaches. C++ had the Design and Evolution, C had the C Programming language, Python doesn't realy have anything to serve this purpose.)

I don't have a strong opinion on web frameworks, it's not what I do. But, from an outsider's point of view, it looks like there are a couple of key players. A year ago it didn't look that way, it seems that things are shaping up nicely. I'm not going to go so far as suggest that we're converging on a single Rails competitor, just that things are looking up.

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