tapan_pandita's comments

tapan_pandita | 13 years ago | on: The PyCon Incident

It was completely in her right to turn around and tell the guys to shut up or bring it to the attention of the organisers. However, I don't think that was her intention at all. Her intention was to gain more mileage out of this. She took an issue about a couple of guys being immature and made it a sexism issue.

Based on her previous tweets (the now famous penis joke that she made, a picture playing cards against humanity), I find it difficult to believe she was offended by a dongle joke. I think she saw an opportunity to use this to further her online cred and that's what she did. Her blog post is the less about the incident (and indeed less about tackling sexism) and more about herself (i find the part about the girl in the picture particularly PR-ish). It was a typical PR move that got blown out of proportion.

This in no way justifies what followed on twitter, which was definitely sexist and misogynistic and very unfortunate. IMO this has pretty much pushed back much of the progress made on tackling the real sexism issues in our industry. Seeing a fellow developer get fired over something so benign (at least for most men, it would seem benign) leads to mistrust and political correctness in dealing with women in the workplace (which sucks!).

tapan_pandita | 13 years ago | on: Language War - Scala versus Python

Python has real good, battle tested and actively developed libraries for math, scientific computing and analytics. Most of these are written in C and hence give great performance in addition to the flexibility of python. Some great ones are: Numpy/Scipy, LAPACK, Pandas (lots more for machine learning as well). Also, I think the REPL is no match for IPython :). For your specific domain (math and analytics) python could be a great fit. Of course the lack of type systems and no compile step can be scary, but for a startup, which needs to move fast, python gives you the power of quick iteration. Just to round this off, from the zen of python:

"practicality beats purity."

tapan_pandita | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Django/Python vs Grails/Groovy?

I agree with you about community vs single company. We live in a world of a shared knowledge base and a good community will beat out a company. However, I am more interested in getting objective points. For example: 1. Impact on development time? 2. Ease of deployment and scaling? 3. Support from cloud providers like heroku, amazon, etc.? 4. Does integrating java in grails slow the development time? 5. If you have to "break" out of the framework to do something different, is it more difficult to do it in grails or django?
page 1