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Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

One business metric that is worth considering is the cost of putting together a Python team vs., say, PHP. Here "cost" doesn't mean salaries as much as it means "cost function" or "difficulty score". Get away from Silicon Valley's reality distortion field and I think Python, today, might still have some issues in this regard.

I am not talking about finding one developer. I am talking about finding one, scaling to five and then beyond that.

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Well, to be fair, SixFeetUp is based in Fortville, Indiana (a bit far away from the "reality distortion field" you mention).

Also, with more and more colleges switching to Python as their Computer Science major's language of choice, finding a team of competent Pythonistas is getting easier. I would think that it helps tremendously to be able to hire remote workers (especially since a town of 4,000 probably won't have more than a couple of people who are Plone experts, at most!)

Hah, Fortville is on the outskirts of Indianapolis, so we have a robust base of developers. Indiana's colleges produce a ton of IT students as well. We do also use remote developers, we are actually looking for a Python developer and a sys admin. Devs can be remote, the sys admin needs to be local. http://www.sixfeetup.com/company/jobs

Also some of the big local companies like to use Python including Angie's List.

I prefer Python for a lot of reasons. The reality of the matter is that, by some accounts, there are over ten times more PHP programmers than Python.

This is changing, which is good.

I always used to use Python as a metric of the quality of a developer. PHP on the resume - Meh. Python on the resume - now there is someone who cares enough about unusual languages to try one out, likes it and follows through. A strong developer.

Of course thats a bit harder now, I would look for a functional language on there these days.

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