I sometimes struggle in business, as I try to lay out things like vision, mission, strategy, guiding principles, and the like. But I don’t struggle to justify why we so often reach for Python: it’s just easy to get things done.
You see, the reality with most software development, especially consulting based custom software development like Level 12 focuses on, is that our customers very rarely care about the programming language we choose. In fact, they usually don’t care about many of the technical details at all. Our customers:
- Usually have a business problem
- One they want solved well
- In as little time as reasonably possible
- For a price that they can see ROI on
To serve our customers well, productivity has to be at the heart of our mission. And if we want to be productive, we have to pick tools and languages that promote developer productivity. We want to focus most of our efforts on the business problem, and not get sucked into implementation details or other esoteric programming concerns that make programming more complicated and the cost of software even higher. Solving business problems is complicated enough, we want a language and other technology tools that add as little additionally complexity as possible. And Python has done that for us and our customers for years. It lets us focus mostly on the business problem at hand and often just gets out of the way.
Python isn’t the answer for every type of programming problem, no language is. But for the back-end on business-focused applications, it’s pretty hard to beat the productivity it brings to our development team.
See also: https://www.level12.io/blog/prioritizing-our-tech-stack/