Python Moving into the Enterprise

Qa1 writes "Seems that Python is moving into the enterprise. At the recent PyCon it has become apparent that it's not just Google, GIS, Nokia or even Microsoft anymore. The article points out that Python is increasingly becoming a perfectly viable and even preferred choice for the enterprise. More and more companies are looking at Python as a good alternative to past favorites like Java. Will we finally be able to code for living in a language that's not painful? Exciting times!"

Comments

Jython?

[Crono]

Aren't some of them using Jython, which is really just Python on top of Java anyway.

Advantages?

[voss, sometimes...]

Im not a coder my self, altough I hahe programmed in Java and in python, but I fail to see Python's advantages comparing to Java in an enterprise environment.

Besides... wasn't Star Trek cancelled?

python performance

[khuber]

Python is a nice language, but it's excruciatingly slow. It's below Tcl on The Computer Language Shootout, which is telling.

Re:python performance

[Sweetshark]

If you feel you have better python code to perform a task on the benchmark, feel free to submit it.
Actually I tweaked around with the code - but the rule of the game are just wrong. Just look at the fibonacci test. It requires you to do the stuff completely recursively - thats one of the rules. So you not only generate a huge return stack, you also calculate all the fibonacci numbers far too often. This is just braindead. A good requirement would say: "Calculate the nth fibonacci number". A simple solution would be to start from the beginning and not recursively calulate every fibonacci number bazillion times.

Ok, the test description says that its task is to show the performance of recursion. But then they have to find a task where recursion is an merit - not a flaw. Otherwise you could claim your language is best because it has the best performing idle loops ....

Re:python performance

[zorander]

I agree with a lot of what you are saying, though it doesn't tend to stop me from using python.

If you want a language that's consistently unsurprising and surprisingly efficient, then try ruby. Performance is not a dream, but that's what compiled languages are for. It lacks most of python's inconsistencies and is really quite pleasant to work with. in ruby there are two sort methods, sort and sort!. One does it in place and one returns a new list. (the ! suffix for mutation and ? suffix for predicates is a gem. I'm pretty sure it was stolen from scheme. It really, really helps make your code clearer)

I still find python more practical for large projects, though, because of the large library and potential for rapid development. I generally use python (possibly with C underpinnings) for larger apps and ruby (with its perl heritage) for scripting. Blocks are the greates when you're dealing with ssh sessions, opening and closing files/database connections, etc. As for per,l I've generally avoided after a few bad experiences trying to decipher six month old code. I really don't think it has a place when ruby has most of its features and enough of it's syntax along with the slickest object system around short of smalltalk.

Kill the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock)

[hagbard5235]

I love python. It's by far my prefered language for development, but it has one major impediment that makes it very hard to take seriously in many rolls in an enterprise: the GIL (global interpreter lock).

You see Python has quite good support for threads, but there are a number of operations in the interpreter that are hacked into being thread safe by providing a global lock on the whole interpreter. One of them is reference counts on objects. So everytime I do an assignment, I have to queue for the GIL. This effectively means that I only really run one thread at a time, even if I have multiple CPUs in the box (or soon, multiple cores).

As more and more applications start shifting to multicpu (or multicore boxes) this problem becomes a much more noticable issue.

Kill the GIL.