Python Language Lacks Proper Positioning In Indian Educational Curriculum

Wednesday, September 03, 2014:  One of the topmost software companies in India has landed in a huge dilemma recently after it won a $200 million contract to develop an app store for a large US bank. The company faced problems as they didn't have sufficient numbers of programmers who know Python programming language for coding the programme. Unfortunately, this app store building required this language mostly.


So, the company had to deploy a freelancers' group of Python programmers in the US for the job, which also cost them badly. But they learnt a huge lesson from this experience that how much this language is also important. India is considered as the largest software programmers' hub. But traditional computer languages are still running in this country at the top which are able to build software applications and maintaining large computers. Python has been ignored till date in this country which emerged as an expensive mistake.

Co-founder and chief operating officer of Profoundis, a Kochi-based technology startup, said, "Because companies like Infosys and TCS prefer proprietary languages like Java or dot NET most students think of these as an option in college. That is the reason you don't get good quality talent in the industry to work with us in Python.” Python is not at all a new language as it was developed back in the late 80's. It's an open source medium which is quite easy to write and can be used in several applications like development, testing and scripting. Python has been embraced by several top companies like Google, Dropbox, Mozilla, Quora, Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Seagate, Qualcomm and IBM.

Though the language is quite popular among developers Python still doesn't feature in the teaching curriculum of schools and universities as conventional languages are taught at most institutions like C, C++ and Java. As revealed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Python is actually the second most popular programming language this year after Java. Indian IT companies like TCS and Wipro began functioning when Python was not popular and most of their codes are written in C, C++, Java and .NET. In May Google India announced the second phase of their "Code to Learn" contest where students of Class VII-X have the option to code in Python.

Ashwani Sharma, India head for university relations at Google, said, "Our intention of including Python in the Code to Learn contest was to introduce a new language to interested students. A lot of professional software developers use Python these days and a number of universities are teaching it as the first programming language but it has less adoption in academia in India.”