Python Evangelism

[Steve Holden]

I've been thinking (and blogging) about python evangelism since PyCon,
as a result of which I created a squidoo lens:

http://www.squidoo.com/pythonlogy

Imagine my surprise at discovering that this has gone up in rank (by
number of views) from # 442,000 or so to #153! Clearly there's some
mileage in marketing Python, and I'd like to keep the buzz going if it
means more people will adopt the language.

Any suggestions for improvement?

regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden [phone] [phone]
Holden Web LLC/Ltd www.holdenweb.com
Love me, love my blog holdenweb.blogspot.com

[Christos Georgiou]

On 11 Mar 2006 03:22:42 -0800, rumours say that "Paul Boddie"
<pa**@boddie.org.uk> might have written:

Tim Churches wrote:

Would it be possible to rename "Cheese Shop" as "Bright Side of Life"?

[Paul]
<snip>
So should a service for finding Python packages have a distinct
identity? It is possible that a package index could be someone's
principal view of the Python world ("I go to Camelot to get... what is
it I get there?"), but the things that emerge from such a service
aren't just downloads that have little in common with each other.
Consequently, I don't think a descriptive name, derived from the name
of the technology, is sensibly avoided in this case.

I like the BSOL idea, but in that case what will the package extension be
instead of .egg? camelot.python.org has the advantage of suggesting an
obvious extension: .graal

So you go to the Camelot to get the graal (or one of them :). In case this
catches on, I'd like to upload ASAP one of my packages [1] called "wholy".

PS "Grail" was a web browser written in Python (or an attempt at one).
[1] It's mostly useless but I trust wholy.graal will be downloaded by
millions.
--
TZOTZIOY, I speak England very best.
"Dear Paul,
please stop spamming us."
The Corinthians

[Douglas Alan]

Andrew Gwozdziewycz <ap****@gmail.com> writes:

Douglas Alan wrote:

Ruby didn't start catching on until Ruby on Rails came out. If
Python has a naming problem, it's with the name of Django, rather
than Python. Firstly, Django doesn't have "Python" in the name, so
it doesn't popularize the language behind it, even should Django
become very popular. Secondly, Django just doesn't have the ring
of "Ruby on Rails".

I'll admit "Ruby on Rails" is a clever name. The fact that you
mention it "didn't catch on" is only partially true.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. By "didn't catch on", I only meant that
it had little mainstream success. At least in the US. I'm certainly
aware that it has had a significant community of devotees for some
time now.
Rails did however jump start it's new career as the definitive
web2.0 language, but who cares? Not me!
Well, I'm not sure that the threat to Python is being fully
appreciated here. I have friends who are fully convinced that Python
is doomed because Ruby has all the buzz now. I think that their
predictions of doom and gloom for Python are overstated. For one
thing, I point out to them that Rails is what really has all the buzz,
not Ruby per se. But such subtle distinctions seem to often get lost
in the type of buzz that causes technologies to succeed or fail. This
is an example of how names are indeed very important.

There *is* a serious worry here. For instance, look how PHP
completely decimated Perl in its biggest market niche at the time (CGI
programming) in just a couple of years. PHP couldn't use that
advantage to threaten the more general scripting niches, but unlike
PHP, Ruby might certainly be able to leverage that advantage, as it is
also a perfectly good general-purpose programming language. Ruby's
domain is not limited to just server-side web scripting.

For those who don't believe that Ruby on Rails does have an incredible
amount of buzz going for it right now, I do have a number of personal
data points that seem to indicate that it is indeed undergoing
exponential growth at the moment: (1) I'm sitting in on a class at MIT
on developing web applications. For their projects and assignments,
the students are allowed to chose whatever programming languages,
databases (as long as they are ACID-compliant), and development
environments that they prefer. From what I can tell, more than half
of the class is using Ruby on Rails. One group is using C# and .NET.
Another is using JSP. No one is using PHP. No one is using Django.
One group was doing straight Python CGI, but I think they switched to
Rails. (2) I've started to see advertisements for web hosting
services where the ads say, "PHP! MySQL! Rails!". (3) I have
friends who work in companies that are big Python shops, but they seem
to be moving to Rails for web development.
Hell I like django quite a bit, but anyone writing something for
django knows it's written in python.
Yes, and for Rails, everyone who has never even seen a single line of
Ruby code knows that it is Ruby-based. The same cannot be said for
Django.
If some non-programmer decided to create a new web app, and his
friend said, 'I hear django is quick and oh, it use's this really
cool easy to learn language python,' What's the difference?

There's a huge difference. Ruby on Rails gives Ruby great brand
recognition, while Django does nothing at all for Python's brand
recognition. Just pay attention to TV commercials: a large fraction
of them have nothing to say whatsoever about the merits of their
product -- the ads just want to get the brand name into your head.
For better or worse, this is how human psychology works.

In any case, it's almost certainly too late for Django to achieve the
kind of popularity that Rails is achieving; if you Google
"web-development rails", you get 3 million hits, while if you Google
"web-development django", you get 82,000 hits. So, unfortunately, how
to best use Django to help popularize Python is almost certainly moot
at this point.

|>oug

[John Pote]

If I get time I'll expand my thoughts and experiences but for now,
Don't know what Ruby on Rails is but it's catchy and current high volume of
interest makes me think - I should look into it. Django, skip reading this
thread before and I had not even picked up it was a Python product (still
don't know what it is too little time to look!)

Python seems to concentrate on language development rather than environment
development. Programmer productivity depends much more on the associated
environment - docs, code editor, libraries, wysiwyg GUI designer - than the
language. So far my experience is that the further away from the core
language the worst things get. My principle moan about the standard library
is lack of formal stating of ALL exceptions that can be thrown by a module.
Sometimes the detail is burried in the general text about the module which
makes it difficult to eye ball quickly. httplib does not mention any of the
socket module exceptions that can be thrown. This makes it difficult to
write stable bullet proof code.

Finding myself slowed down too much by hand coding tkinter (and modifying it
weeks later) I've switched to wxPython and Glade. Certainly better but
wxPython docs are not ideal. (only reason for switching is lack of wysiwyg
GUI designer for it)

I get a myApp.pyw working on one machine. Copy to another and maybe forget
something (usually updating my own python library so a header import fails)
and what happens? nothing if tkinter has not yet fired up the gui. and even
if it has and there's an uncaught exception the app just closes. Any error
message and traceback are dumped because there's no dos box.

On the positive side Twisted (I have the docs and book) looks exactly what I
need in all respects.

I think the language has already made Python, the rest is down to its
'environment'.

Best wishes to everyone,

John Pote


"Douglas Alan" <ne****@mit.edu> wrote in message
news:m2************@lexx.mit.edu...

Andrew Gwozdziewycz <ap****@gmail.com> writes:

Douglas Alan wrote:

Ruby didn't start catching on until Ruby on Rails came out. If
Python has a naming problem, it's with the name of Django, rather
than Python. Firstly, Django doesn't have "Python" in the name, so
it doesn't popularize the language behind it, even should Django
become very popular. Secondly, Django just doesn't have the ring
of "Ruby on Rails".

I'll admit "Ruby on Rails" is a clever name. The fact that you
mention it "didn't catch on" is only partially true.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. By "didn't catch on", I only meant that
it had little mainstream success. At least in the US. I'm certainly
aware that it has had a significant community of devotees for some
time now.

Rails did however jump start it's new career as the definitive
web2.0 language, but who cares? Not me!

Well, I'm not sure that the threat to Python is being fully
appreciated here. I have friends who are fully convinced that Python
is doomed because Ruby has all the buzz now. I think that their
predictions of doom and gloom for Python are overstated. For one
thing, I point out to them that Rails is what really has all the buzz,
not Ruby per se. But such subtle distinctions seem to often get lost
in the type of buzz that causes technologies to succeed or fail. This
is an example of how names are indeed very important.

There *is* a serious worry here. For instance, look how PHP
completely decimated Perl in its biggest market niche at the time (CGI
programming) in just a couple of years. PHP couldn't use that
advantage to threaten the more general scripting niches, but unlike
PHP, Ruby might certainly be able to leverage that advantage, as it is
also a perfectly good general-purpose programming language. Ruby's
domain is not limited to just server-side web scripting.

For those who don't believe that Ruby on Rails does have an incredible
amount of buzz going for it right now, I do have a number of personal
data points that seem to indicate that it is indeed undergoing
exponential growth at the moment: (1) I'm sitting in on a class at MIT
on developing web applications. For their projects and assignments,
the students are allowed to chose whatever programming languages,
databases (as long as they are ACID-compliant), and development
environments that they prefer. From what I can tell, more than half
of the class is using Ruby on Rails. One group is using C# and .NET.
Another is using JSP. No one is using PHP. No one is using Django.
One group was doing straight Python CGI, but I think they switched to
Rails. (2) I've started to see advertisements for web hosting
services where the ads say, "PHP! MySQL! Rails!". (3) I have
friends who work in companies that are big Python shops, but they seem
to be moving to Rails for web development.

Hell I like django quite a bit, but anyone writing something for
django knows it's written in python.

Yes, and for Rails, everyone who has never even seen a single line of
Ruby code knows that it is Ruby-based. The same cannot be said for
Django.

If some non-programmer decided to create a new web app, and his
friend said, 'I hear django is quick and oh, it use's this really
cool easy to learn language python,' What's the difference?

There's a huge difference. Ruby on Rails gives Ruby great brand
recognition, while Django does nothing at all for Python's brand
recognition. Just pay attention to TV commercials: a large fraction
of them have nothing to say whatsoever about the merits of their
product -- the ads just want to get the brand name into your head.
For better or worse, this is how human psychology works.

In any case, it's almost certainly too late for Django to achieve the
kind of popularity that Rails is achieving; if you Google
"web-development rails", you get 3 million hits, while if you Google
"web-development django", you get 82,000 hits. So, unfortunately, how
to best use Django to help popularize Python is almost certainly moot
at this point.

|>oug