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

Microsoft only embraces things...

[MikeDataLink]

that give them a competitive edge. The second they get the marketshare they want in an area support for other competing products is eliminated.

Microsoft

[sit1963nz]

Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why Python?

[guruevi]

I just don't see what other people see in the hype of Python. It has poor backwards compatibility (Python 3 != Python 2), it is single-threaded like JavaScript and it's pretty slow all around unless you code all your libraries in C (and throw away all the stuff that makes it Python)

Sure it's easy to learn, but then so is JavaScript, PHP and Perl.

Re:Why Python?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Unlike JS, PHP or Perl, I actually know people who make C libraries and hook them into Python. It's a great way to do small, high-level things that tie together many components quickly.

Re:Why Python?

[roskakori]

It has poor backwards compatibility (Python 3 != Python 2)

This is mostly an issue if you mix Python versions. These days reasonably modern shops tend to solely use Python 3.

(It is definitely annoying though if you never got the budget to migrate your legacy project from Python 2 to Python 3 or if you do operations work on some ancient box that only includes Python 2.)

it is single-threaded like JavaScript and it's pretty slow all around unless you code all your libraries in C (and throw away all the stuff that makes it Python)

Many classic Python usage scenarios simply use Python libraries that wrap C libraries. Most important everything related to data science and machine learning. There Python is used to express business logic and C libraries do the actual computation.

Apart from that, there are plenty of scenarios where Python is "fast enough" and you don't really care if you get the result in 0.001 seconds or 0.005 seconds.

It's really about picking the right tool for the right job. And sometimes faster development time is more important than faster execution time.

Re:didn't they first tie a version only to Windows

[Actually, I do RTFA]

IronPython sounded great. It used the same .NET virtual machine as C#, F#, etc. So it was designed for interoperability with other MS languages. It's great if your team is already using C# and you want to write python to integrate various modules (like if you had a bunch of C libraries and wanted to use regular python.)

The guy in charge of the project got let go like a decade ago and now it's OSS on GitHub.

Re:You mean....

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can keep that kind of thought where it belongs, behind closed doors. NO ONE thinks code references to "master/slave" literally means the same as human slavery. Reminds me of a coworker who got angry at the term "orphan" because SHE worked with orphan children. The idea that orphan document was completely different from a human child was something she couldn't accept. Orphan child process set her off the deepend though. At that point we may or may not have given up on her stupidity and used every opprotunity we could to use the terms (correctly of course), but no one cared when she was canned.

Bottom line, sjw correctness is a cancer that spreads.