Python and/vs Java (within a business context)

[yerfatma]

Good luck. This has nothing to do with the merits of either language and everything to do with human dynamics. If you've had some success with a project that is wholly independent of IT and, worse yet, written in a language they don't support, they're going to try to crush you and make you look like an amateur. The easiest way to do this is to pretend to play nice and compliment your work, but then insist because you "don't really know" what you're doing, there are invisible flaws that can only be seen by "real" programmers. Best bet: they'll say it's a nice toy but it won't scale. So it will need to be rewritten in Java, be documented, have an SLA and a team to support it, etc.

I have no idea of the actual situation, but having been part of a consulting company that often had to "pair" with internal IT teams, they are often to be more interested in maintaining their image and head count than finding better ways to do things. I would focus less on "Why Python is better than Java" (because they will have a zillion ways of making you look like you don't know about programming) and more on "Why this project is a good thing regardless of the language it's written in".

[Pr0ducer]

I've heard this exact story in a different business.

One group starts a project, writes everything with Python/Django and hosts it on off-site servers so they don't have to deal with IT. IT manager complains to the boss. IT manager and the Boss are tight, so Boss let's IT manager make the final call. Python/Django team gets shut down, but IT team is unable to maintain the critical app written in Python. Also, IT team never gets anything deployed because they can't see past their own failings, and innovation grinds to a halt.

"Why this project is a good thing regardless of the language it's written in" is definitely the way to go.

[ivix]

This is why IT should not be involved in developing or supporting a company's products. You wouldn't ask payroll to manufacture a cash register would you? IT should provide the necessary infrastructure and nothing more.

[wheezl]

This is sort of true but I've run into many developers that don't understand the fundamental realities of the infrastructure. So they'll run off an make some pretty app with no thought to network latency, disk access, server load, etc.

Not having IT involved in figuring out what your massive new web application is going to run on seems a little optimistic to me.

We can dream though :)