Python in the enterprise: Pros and cons [closed]

Banca d'Italia (roughly the Italian equivalent of the Fed, except that, since the introduction of the Euro, all countries using euros as their currency, including of course Italy, have "outsourced" monetary policy to the European Central Bank) uses Python, is very happy with it, and plans to extend its use. The talk I'm pointing to is in Italian, but if you search around for the authors I think you can find similar papers of theirs in English.

Sungard's FrontArena, a widespread "next generation cross-asset trading" system, uses Python (e.g., see here).

This post gives a good summary of Python use in banking (as of a couple years ago) with focus on the City of London.

Considering how banks like to "play them close to their vest" I think it's amazing that there's as much information as this about the use of Python in banking -- if these few cases "leak", just imagine how many must be staying under wraps!-)

Of course you can implement mission-critical software (whatever that is in your case) using Python. At the end of the day the success of your application is going to weigh more on its capabilities than whether it is written in Python. Some all .NET companies will even bring in Python applications provided that there is a way to talk to the system from .NET.

I would not market your application as being a Python application. This is going to cause you trouble down the road because you will run into roadblocks. This often happens when you satisfy a business customer and he speaks to their IT guy who says "whoa we can't support that" without a full analysis of the cost/benefit to the business. This is the place that references to use of Python in mission-critical systems will arise. Try to avoid this area.

With Python you can always target the popular platforms if you build your application under certain constraints. IronPython runs on .NET and Jython runs on Java. Being able to fire back with info on how to run your application on these platforms might be helpful.

There is a rather famous application heavily used in both banks and hedge funds called FrontArena. I believe that this is written in Python.

Additionally the numpy numeric processing libraries and concise, clear syntax means that Python is very popular with Quantitative Analysts (or quants) within the financial sector.