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Comment by dep_b | Hacker News Reader

Could someone enlighten me on the special status Python seems to enjoy inside Microsoft? It's pretty well supported for something that is not invented by Microsoft.

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They also support node.js, from what I recall. And you can use PHP on Azure.

And especially Drupal.

From what I hear, Node is getting a lot of love (all things considered) at Microsoft and especially at Azure.

If you look at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/downloads/

Azure supports (in varying degrees):

.NET, node.js, php, java, python, and ruby.

It also has CLI tools for linux and osx.

If you look into the Azure docs, you will see that many of the services have an XML definition that can certainly be implemented on differing platforms.

VS also appears to get some love including additional JS support, PVTS, etc.

as untog mentioned, since Azure came on the scene, a whole bunch of new languages and runtimes have been supported: java, python, php, node.js, hadoop, ... even linux. i'd say that from a visual studio perspective Python is the best oss/non-msft language that's currently supported.

Microsoft has also contributed Hyper-V drivers to FreeBSD 10, presumably to allow FreeBSD servers to run on Azure:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=38019

I've heard some bad reviews from a friend on the network performance of the FreeBSD/Hyper-V network drivers. But slow support is way better than no support.

Do you know if they've tested the drivers recently? Apparently it's been possible to run FreeBSD on Hyper-V for a while now; these drivers are fairly new (they were only committed to the FreeBSD source tree a few months ago), so if your friend is interested in using FreeBSD on Azure, you might ask him/her to try testing again using FreeBSD 10-ALPHA4 or newer. If they do try again and get the same results, post something in the thread I linked above with details so someone can look into it (either the Microsoft dev or a FreeBSD kernel dev).

Python is one of the few open source languages that offered decent first class support for windows from very early on. Its windows api bindings and official windows installer has always been miles ahead of for example Perl, PHP or Ruby. This led to a lot of windows devs (both inside and outside of MS) looking for a good cross platform language to flock to Python.

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