jessenoller.com

Steve Holden has hit the nail on the head in a recent blog post about python “mar­ket­ing” Mar­ket­ing? Why Do You Use Python?

I’ve already posted a com­ment, but I fig­ured I would expand on it a litte — at my cur­rent com­pany we orig­i­nally went with Perl/Java/Shell/C for every­thing out­side of the core prod­uct (ie: tools, installers, etc). Hav­ing an amal­ga­ma­tion of lan­guages is inter­est­ing, and peo­ple really sim­ply picked those things they already knew.

Over the past few years, as I have got­ten “bet­ter with the Python” I have slowly seeded a “rev­o­lu­tion” of sorts. I’ve man­aged to get a lot of peo­ple (Java peo­ple, Perl peo­ple, Shell Peo­ple) using Python for many things. (And no, I can’t talk about most of them).

But the way I “started the rev­o­lu­tion” was to show them the RAD aspects of the lan­guage, and show­case the fact that yes — it does scale, yes, other com­pa­nies use it. Yes, it is easy to learn — “look, I just hooked N peo­ple on the lan­guage and they have become X+% more pro­duc­tive”. I gen­er­ated exam­ples, taught peo­ple, and led by exam­ple wher­ever pos­si­ble, fre­quently build­ing highly use­ful appli­ca­tions and point­ing at them and say­ing “look!”.

I would show­case the stan­dard library and ease of use. Luck­ily — every­one in the chain of com­mand is highly tech­ni­cal, so it is easy for me to “win” on tech­ni­cal merit. But Python can’t just be mar­keted to the tech­ni­cal peo­ple. I/we can’t/shouldn’t make the same mis­takes that the Java Hype Machine made, and we can’t start a Microsoft-esque smear cam­paign against other languages.

Python is a won­der­ful tool, and a won­der­ful lan­guage. It’s ease of use, porta­bil­ity and RAD aspects make it highly ver­sa­tile and easy to use to ramp up less tech­ni­cal peo­ple into more tech­ni­cal roles (this is what I have done with the QA team inter­nally), but it also serves as a highly pow­er­ful tool for even the most tech­ni­cal of devel­op­ers. (We should mar­ket to both groups)

Don’t mar­ket Python based off the neg­a­tive of other lan­guages. Show peo­ple the mer­its of the lan­guage, and show them appli­ca­tions, show them how to Win and become suc­cess­ful with the lan­guage. Show them case stud­ies of other com­pa­nies, and let them decide.

Get the word out, and make is sim­ple, and make it clear. Good mar­ket­ing cam­paigns tend to offer a clar­ity and sim­plic­ity that attract peo­ple. You don’t see Nike mar­ket­ing mes­sages about the new sole of a new shoe, do you? No. You see them say­ing “if you get this shoe, you will be a winner”.

Let’s see if we can show peo­ple “If you pick Python, you will be a win­ner!” (And here’s why…)

Steve Holden has hit the nail on the head in a recent blog post about python “mar­ket­ing” Mar­ket­ing? Why Do You Use Python? I’ve already posted a com­ment, but I...