Resolver Systems: A Python Success Story

By Michael Foord -
One of my colleagues, the newly nuptialed Mr. Jonathan Hartley, decided that working through summer was definitely not what cool cats should do - and promptly disappeared to the states for a sabbatical. Still, he hasn't entirely frittered the time away on fun and sunning himself and he can prove it because he's written up a 'Python Success Story' which is now part of the collection on the Pythonology Website run by Wingware. This tells the story of Python at Resolver Systems, including how and why we chose IronPython - and how that choice worked out so well for us.

Resolver Systems is a two year-old start-up based on the outskirts of London's financial district. Our first product, Resolver One, is a desktop and web-accessible spreadsheet aimed primarily at the financial services market. It is written entirely in IronPython, and directly exposes end-users to Python, both as expressions in cell formulae, and as an embedded scripting language which provides programmatic access to spreadsheet content.

Resolver One launched in Spring of 2008, by which time the team had grown to fourteen people, and the codebase to 40k lines of product and 140k lines of tests.

From the outset, it was clear that it would be good to use an existing language as our embedded scripting language, rather than inventing one. A dynamic language would confer appropriate type semantics on the spreadsheet formulae...

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