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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."
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."
that give them a competitive edge. The second they get the marketshare they want in an area support for other competing products is eliminated.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
"In 2018, we are out and proud about Python"
Careful, or some SJW will accuse you of cultural appropriation.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
... wrapped themselves around it squeezed real tight?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I thought they first took python and hooked it into a bunch of Microsoft One Way products and called it iron python or something like that.
Most likely the only reason why Microsoft might now accept and embrace standard Python now is because, like Linux, they can't ignore what the rest of the world is doing any more. The desktop control doesn't have the power it once wielded.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Python embraces you.
Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Reads like a paid infomercial.
Lets not forget their getting triggered over master/slave -- https://github.com/python/cpyt...
The parallel computing community was never that happy about calling the paradigm master/slave. Most references use the terminology master/worker these days. We can find references to manager/worker which sound a lot more neutral that date back decades. ( A PACT 2001 paper as a proof https://link.springer.com/chap... )
Lots of term in parallel computing ended up being renamed to make the term more accurate or more neutral. Famously, we no longer talk about "embarrassingly parallel" applications, but about "pleasingly parallel" applications because there is nothing embarrassing about the application being very parallel.
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.
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Whoever thought it was a good idea to use whitespace as a language construct needs to be taken out back and shot. Python can be the greatest language in the world but until that horseshit goes away it's dead to me and most other not-shit programmers.
Visual Py#
#DeleteChrome
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.
White space of death
Table-ized A.I.
Lets not forget their getting triggered over master/slave -- https://github.com/python/cpyt...
No, I'm not kidding.
To save anyone else the effort, the parent is totally mischaracterizing the change linked. "Pliant children" (referring to functions, not processes or hardware) was changed to "helpers", which I think most people would say is clearer. It formerly said "pliant slaves", which is not a descriptive thing to call a function, like calling my fork a pliant slave.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
They could also engage in the mental gymnastics used to explain BDSM where the "submissive" person is really the "person in control". It seems like the X windows "master/slave" relationship, where the display on your local screen is called the "server" and the program running on the remote computer which you display locally is called the "client". It is completely backwards from the mental model most people use for a program running on one machine, displayed on another machine.
I'd be deeply concerned about Python's support for installing quite random dependency chains from https://www.pypi.org/ to satisfy a need for a Python module. Much as ant, gradle, and maven install untested Java modules from the Internet, and as CPAN installed Perl modules, they brought dependency chains with them that could displace and break cricical functioning code. I recently had to help recover a critical system where a release engineer ran "pip install" as a root user and wound up upgrading critical modules in the operating system's built-in package management software.
There are ways to ameliorate the risks, such as using the "virtualenv" utility to install the modules inside what its own playground. But I'll be very curious to see how Microsoft tries to contain the risk of such upgrades.
Similar experience: a technically illiterate boss blocked us fron using Git for months because 'git' is a childish insult in British English. He couldn't believe a polished piece of software would have a name like that. Explaining that Apache software did not derive its name from Native Americans but was a play on words of "a patch" for buggy software didn't help.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
I would bloody well hope that any change would be dramatic after eight years of changing.
...
The only thing I meant is that the renaming is a lot older than the discussion in python. And in practice Master/Slave is not a term very used by the community to denote that organization. Master/Worker is the term that I hear the most. I hear Manager-Worker mostly as a side notes ("sometimes people call that manager-worker")
I was actually surprised when Hadoop chose to call the non-master nodes 'slaves' since the parallel computing community had pretty much moved to calling them 'worker'.
NO ONE thinks code references to "master/slave" literally means the same as human slavery.
The etymology of the word "slave" is directly referential to human slavery, and there are other words which are just as descriptive, if not moreso.
Reminds me of a coworker who got angry at the term "orphan" because SHE worked with orphan children.
Another poor choice, since that word is descended from the Greek for bastard.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But it has horrendous maintainability characteristics. So many hours I have spent reverse engineering someone else's Python just to determine what kind of object a method returned in different situations.
Python is important today because machine learning folks use it - but that's because they don't know any better - they are scientists and tend to work on very small teams and are not concerned with software engineering best practices. If you want to build something that is part of a much larger whole, and that gets shared across teams over time, use a typesafe language - you will save some heart attacks.
The term 'retry/miscarry' would have been much more considerate to use.
Microsoft's culture has historically been several grades beyond mere NIH, something more akin to "not warheaded here syndrome".
With Java, Microsoft was neither slow nor reluctant to slip in the payload package, and pretty soon Java was reduced to a "write once, debug everywhere" programming language that Microsoft could truly count as one their own.
was a wonderful baby that was born sick and was then strangled
in its crib before it could barely walk.
I had one as a university admin for the CS department in the 90s,
and it was 10 times more reliable than the wintel machines.
The alphas were beautifully designed, though not hardware agnostic
like the PC clones, you had to shell out big $$ to DEC to get hard drives
and expansion cards. DECnet was still a big thing in universities, most
campus networks used DECnet or Novell NetWare (IPX) , NT used NetBIOS
over NetWare mostly, but we had a bunch of DEC Unix at the CS dept, so we
juggled TCP/IP along with all that. The University gobbled up the Community
College whole, so inherited a huge VAX/VMS network with it, so integration
got really messy, but DEC Unix Alpha was a good bridge there, until all
the old KayPro machines got swapped out for cheap Dells and Gateway 2000s
running Windows 98 with NT login. The CS dept held out until Win XP machines
were cheap and available, and the CS student enrollment tripled after the 2000s.
NT Alphas chugged along for about 8 years before they started dying and you
could not get parts or disks, and DECnet networks were just a wind whistling through
the digital Graveyard. When NetWare was phased out, Only NT Intel servers existed,
Except the VAX mini machine, which carried on for 20 more years! Indeed, it was actually
replaced by another mini running OpenVMS around 2010....!
No, I don't like them, either; in 2017 I finally managed to move everything to Linux except three or four apps still living under Wine or in a Virtualbox VM, and it was the best decision regarding my home/homeoffice IT I ever made.
I'm still surprised, though, that so many intelligent people see the evil in Microsoft (or Google, Facebook, Oracle, Amazon, eBay, IBM, ...) as a specific property of Microsoft (and Google, Facebook, Oracle, Amazon, eBay, IBM), Microsoft (Google, etc.; you get the lyrics) as a particularly evil entity within the otherwise potentially good or at least neutral economic system.
While Microsoft etc. really are just the essence of what this economic system is about. Microsoft etc. is the rule, not the exception. And all the (as righteous as it is) complaining about evil Microsoft etc. won't change a thing. Even if it would lead to an improbable breaking up of Microsoft through competiton laws, something similar would follow soon.
And even if the whole world would from January 1 on start using only free software and installing free operating systems, the world still would be the place of the corporations, not the people, unless there'd be a change of the world operating system, too.
Says the person with a synonym of shit in his name.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
python is the new basic, basic was invented by microsoft.
in the spirit of basic, it only makes sense to embrace it.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Says the person with a synonym of shit in his name.
It rather proves the point, don't you think?
I lost my original slashdot login, whose name I cannot remember. It was high five digit. It's weird I didn't just use "drink" though, which is the normal reason I've used "drinkypoo". Based on UIDs, it wasn't in use when I signed up...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"