On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 11:02 PM, Robert Nesius <nesius at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 10:57 PM, Erik Mitchell <erik.mitchell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Because he works for a Java shop ;)

:-P


> Well - there's a difference between "I have no interesting in using Python
> for enterprise apps" versus "I can't use Java for enterprise apps".

While I can when determining the architecture for my customer (which
is usually), a lot of times platform choices are pre-determined by the
customer, such as "Tomcat/WebSphere/other container".

Although Java is far from perfect, the JVM ecosystem is so fantastic
it's hard for many not to use it - maturity, performance, scalability,
multi-platform, popularity, frameworks, tools, other JVM languages
(specialties), etc.  While the Java free-open-source world has plenty
of garbage and abandoned projects, it also has some fantastic
products.  Saves a lot of dev and maint time and "it just works".  So
most of my work involves JVM languages and Java's "enterprise
specs"/tools/frameworks.  Of course, there's Jython, which can then
allow access to all the JVM-related stuff...

The movement in "my world" is not to Python, PHP, etc, but instead to
also Groovy/Grails, Scala.  Additional arguments move towards
Ruby/Rails, but that's also not in my world ATM. Then there are those
who argue for Clojure...

Lastly, the perception of Python, PHP, et al as "scripting languages"
doesn't help them.  Conversations with a few PHP-guru friends who now
dislike PHP work (and similar languages) after moving to Java some
years ago (and recently Groovy/Scala), they mention the resulting app
in Java as "more maintainable" vs the CF the PHP apps became (so does
Python fit into that argument?  And no, I don't have proof for their
assertion.).  Yet I always wonder was that due to the language or the
authors. :-)  One of them is quite the JavaScript guru, and has opened
my eyes as to what a powerful language it is, and future potential
with it.  So popularity and applicability of language (and viability
on the JVM) cause me to only have used Python in a couple of
circumstances as scripts (from existing stuff).  And these days, in my
world, we'll typically use Groovy for the scripts instead.