Re:Ask HN: Why does the enterprise have such a strong affini...
by sssilver on Sunday July 27, 2014 @04:50AM
(#8092285)
I don't know about Ruby, but can you please elaborate about Python? I'd argue that non-cross platform Python code is actually quite uncommon.
There are of course OS-specific features that can be bound to Python code, but those can be bound to Java code as well.
Re:Ask HN: Why does the enterprise have such a strong affini...
by kyllo on Monday July 28, 2014 @11:46AM
(#8097442)
Getting the development environment set up on Windows can be a pain. Trying to build an existing project that was developed on UNIX, you have to replace any shell scripts, make sure your Windows Path variable is right, set up a new virtualenv, etc. But the biggest problem isn't the Python code, it's compiling the libraries that are written in C/C++, Fortran, etc. It can be a struggle to get some of those to compile on Windows, and they do not support Cygwin either.
This is a pretty big factor, that it's actually portable. Develop on Windows workstations, deploy to either Windows or UNIX servers without changing anything. Thats just not possible with C/C++. Difficult to even do with Ruby or Python.
Also, the class-based OOP design and interfaces make it easy for many programmers to work on little compartmentalized parts of the same massive system. And of course it lacks the dangerous features of a language like C++. Everything is an object with attributes and methods, and the objects can have a hierarchy. It's an abstraction that's pretty easy to understand conceptually without much CS knowledge, and it's easy to model business processes with it, so managers like it.