This evening Google announced its much anticipated web services initiative dubbed Google App Engine. While I’m thrilled to see more of the building blocks of Internet scale, utility computing moving to the cloud, I wanted to quickly write what I think might not be such an obvious side effect. That is, I believe this announcement is going to drive python adoption in a big way. Currently the only way to interface with Google App Engine is by writing python code that runs on Google’s server farms. Those sitting on the fence about python now have a huge motivation to jump into the python side of the yard.

Python doesn’t get the notoriety or attention of Ruby on Rails or java for sure and isn’t as widely used as perl or PHP, but python has quietly become the language of choice of the professional systems engineer. Like ruby and perl, python is a dynamic, interpreted, scripting language. Like ruby and java, it’s fully object oriented. Python enforces some stylistic and syntax conventions that make it more readable and therefore easier to maintain than other languages.

A systems engineer is someone who writes software to automate the deployment, management and monitoring of servers. They are programmers who spend part of their time writing persistent code that sticks around for years and part of their time writing single use utility programs. Python works great for both. While python isn’t a household variety programming language, it has become the standard for systems programming at two of the biggest Internet scale software companies - Yahoo and Google.

We’ll have to see over the upcoming months how Google compares and differs from Amazon Web Services but I for one am thrilled to see that adoption of python is going to go way up.