Advocacy (ād’və-kə-sē) n.
- the profession or work of an advocate
- the action of advocating, pleading for, or supporting a cause or proposal
Jeff Rush recently took on the mantel of ‘Python Advocacy Coordinator’. Some members of the PSF and the Python community at large feel that there is no need for this position and no need for Python Advocacy in general. At first my knee jerk reaction was one of surprise, ‘Why would we not want to advocate Python Isn’t that part of the PSF mission statement?’
The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of the international community of Python programmers.
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- Publicizes, promotes the adoption of, and facilitates the ongoing development of Python-related technology and educational resources. This includes, but is not limited to, maintaining a public web site, planning Python conferences, and offering grants to Python-related open source projects.
I had always assumed Python advocacy was a worthwhile and critical effort (critical as derived from the word critique). This is a dangerous assumption and one I based solely on my own personal experiences with Python in corporate and educational environments. Python as a language and a community is growing at an alarming rate. PyCon saw a 44% increase in size this past year, and there are 3 more Python conferences in mainland Europe this year (Euro Python, PyCon Italy, and one other to be announced soon). There are numerous other conferences, unconferences and events where Python will be prominent or are centered around Python based technology (OSCon, RuPy, Plone, BarCamp, SciPy, PyWeek, etc, etc). MIT now uses Python as the language to teach programming. Corporate uptake and endorsement of Python in the past three years has been staggering; Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Nasdaq, Nasa, Sony, DreamWorks, RedHat, Apple. The current most popular change management systems (Subversion+Trac) are Python based. The bane of the RIAA and MPAA, bittorrent is Python Financial institutions, whom are very conservative when it comes to their in-house technology, are turning to Python. A quick look at the Python jobs board and a more detailed look at it’s history shows a huge demand for skilled Python developers in just about every field of business. There was a running joke at PyCon where speakers would get up and say ‘Hello, my name is <your name> and I am not hiring’. It was a running joke because out of over 100 speakers, 3 said it. Guess what the other ~100 said? I mean, when you have Mark Shuttleworth and Tim O’Reilly on your side, what more do you need?
Python is Python’s best advocate. Should it be the only advocate? The language and the communities behind and on top of the language speak softly, but with a combined power that is simply overwhelming. In that sense Python has it’s advocates all over the world. So why isn’t Python being mentioned on CNN like Java, Ruby on Rails and PHP are? Is that a good thing? The truth is, Python is not all that well known and largely misunderstood. It does not get write-ups in CIO Magazine; it does not show up on mid-sized corporate radar. On some level I feel this is a good thing. I don’t like the idea of Python being a bullet item on some marketing slide or CIO’s ‘vision’. The problem is what this does for the real Python advocates; the programmers, developers, and engineers out there who want to use the right tool to solve their problem. If they feel that right tool is Python, they need the information, the numbers, the facts to back up that decision. No one ever gets fired for choosing J2EE (to turn a phrase).
