How Microsoft Embraced Python (medium.com)

Steve Dower, a Python developer at Microsoft, describes how the language become popular internally: In 2010, our few Pythonistas were flying under the radar, in case somebody noticed that they could reassign a few developers to their own project. The team was small, leftover from a previous job, but was chipping away at a company culture that suffered from "not invented here" syndrome: Python was a language that belonged to other people, and so Microsoft was not interested. Over the last eight years, the change has been dramatic. Many Microsoft products now include Python support, and some of the newest only support Python. Some of our critical tools are written in Python, and we are actively investing in the language and community....

In 2018, we are out and proud about Python, supporting it in our developer tools such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, hosting it in Azure Notebooks, and using it to build end-user experiences like the Azure CLI. We employ five core CPython developers and many other contributors, are strong supporters of open-source data science through NumFOCUS and PyData, and regularly sponsor, host, and attend Python events around the world.
"We often felt like a small startup within a very large company" Downer writes, in a post for the Medium community "Microsoft Open Source Stories."

Comments

Re:Why Python?

[SuperKendall]

I'm not sure either but there's no question that Python has gained massive popularity - and not from Microsoft especially, but all over. Microsoft is simply following the trend here.

I honestly think a large part of the adoption is the tooling, specifically Jupyter notebooks that let you kind of run code mixed with documenting what you are doing, leaning on a wide range of libraries for various things, along with modules of your own code. Yes there are other things that kind of do that but it's done really well.

Also as I mentioned, wide scope framework support is a big reason why Python may be winning out over some other languages with more narrowly sets of abilities to hook into.