Enterprises Hope That Python Will Make Them AI-first

Maybe the surprise isn't that they're trying to follow the hype, but that they're abandoning Java

I got the T-shirt, the notebook and the branded pin with the lock and the key. But why does Jane Street have a stand at a Python conference?

I spoke at Pycon earlier this month. Behind the massive stands from Meta (“we’re open source!”), AWS (“we’re open source!”) and Microsoft (“we’re really trying!”), tucked away in a corner, sat the Jane Street stand.

I’ve talked about Jane Street before. It’s a proprietary trading firm, known in the tech industry not just because they’re highly profitable, but because, and I quote Wikipedia, “almost all of its software is written in the OCaml programming language”.

That is, until now apparently.

Because the T-shirt that I’ve got featured two animals on a sidecar motorcycle, with the camel (representing OCaml) in the passenger’s seat, and the snake (representing Python) in the rider’s.

Decades after Yaron Minsky persuaded the company not to choose C++, Python is used in production at one of the most technologically savvy hedge funds in the world.

Here’s the thing: it’s not just Jane Street.

Revolut is expanding its team of Python coders, AstraZeneca switched to Python in order to develop its drug discovery software, and Stripe, when faced with the choice of keeping Ruby or switching to Java, ended up building a static type checker called Sorbet so that they could stick with Ruby.

At Kiwi.com, the company I work for, we use Python for everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if the water cooler runs on Python too.

Nobody is noticing this trend.

Because everyone, of course, is talking about AI.

I don’t know about you, but I’m already exhausted from following the news on AI. Yes, a report from Productiv puts chatGPT among the top 10 shadow IT apps. It’s used everywhere. I get it.

In contrast, what I want to talk about today is that these tools are embedded in a larger trend, one that has been running for a long time now. And that’s the slow drift away from Java and C# as the programming language choices for enterprise software, in favor of Python, Ruby, Go or Javascript.

Just like everyone a few years ago was using Oracle, and now no one does.

The Embedded AI Trend

We’re still debating whether using AI to make engineers write code faster is a good thing.

Is losing the ability to build without an AI assistant a bad thing? Is the system built with AI as buggy as one built without it? Are we all going to be jobless?

I don’t care. Not because the questions aren’t worth asking, but because nobody really knows the answers.

But if we don’t understand the trends that made AI tools possible, we’re going to misuse them, because we won’t understand where they are the most impactful, and where they’re just another shiny toy.

Just like developers who aimlessly ‘vibe code’ themselves into a corner, executives and senior engineers who blindly declare themselves “AI-first” will disappoint those around them when their AI initiatives fail to deliver the results they proclaimed.

This is The Payments Engineer Playbook. Today we’re talking about what programming language to choose for your money software, from the point of view of the broader enterprise industry. I gave a talk on this very topic a while ago at Europython, and so if you’re curious to learn more about it, go watch it.

Otherwise, let’s dive in.