Solving the “Two-Language” Problem

In many organizations, it is common to research, prototype, and test new ideas using a more specialized computing language like SAS or R and then later port those ideas to be part of a larger production system written in, say, Java, C#, or C++.

What people are increasingly finding is that Python is a suitable language not only for doing research and prototyping but also for building production systems.

Why maintain two development environments when one will suffice? I believe that more and more companies will go down this path, as there are often significant organizational benefits to having both researchers and software engineers using the same set of programming tools.