Diwali, Python & Ranked Choice Voting
A Festival, a Language, and a Voting System Walk into a Blog…
There’s a famous saying in the tech world, and I first heard it at a PyCon conference:
"Python is the second-best language for everything."
I don’t know who said it first, but it has some ground truths. For example, R will be best suited for many tasks in Data Science and Analytics, but you can do almost everything with Python also. Again, for scientific computing, you have MATLAB, Fortran, and the new kid, Julia, but there are robust packages (like SciPy) from Python that can do everything.
Most of my work revolves around these two domains, but I think this “second-best” principle holds for other areas of tech, too. In web development, for example, JavaScript and Ruby dominate, yet Python is still a strong contender with frameworks like Django and Flask.
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It sure seems like Python is the second-best language for almost everything—even when there might be “better” options.
Last week (October 31st) was Diwali. This year’s theme among many corporate social media posts was something along the lines of: “For Christmas, there’s a week-long holiday in the US, but nothing for Indians on Diwali.”
A lot of these posts on social media (LinkedIn, X, etc.) are easy to ignore—which I do like a pro—but some are a tad irritating. Take this one, for example. Diwali isn’t the biggest festival for many Indians. In the western parts of the country, Navratri and Ganesh Chaturthi take precedence. In the east, it’s Durga Pujo, Rath Yatra, or Chhath Puja, while southern India celebrates a range of festivals like Ugadi, Onam, and Vinayaka Chavithi.
Initially, I thought that if given the choice, most people would probably prefer time off during their biggest local festival, which often wouldn’t be Diwali. So, a blanket holiday week for Diwali alone might not make sense, even if it were to happen in the future.
But then my perception shifted a bit after seeing different people from a society celebrate Diwali. While it might not be the most celebrated festival across the country, Diwali is almost certainly the second (or, at worst, the third) most popular festival for a vast majority of people.
It’s kind of like the Python of festivals.
There’s a voting system called ranked-choice voting (RCV) that is used in some US states, as well as in countries like Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand for certain elections. The main benefit of RCV is that it often picks an alternative that most people either agree with or, at the very least, don’t strongly oppose. In situations without a clear top choice, the second-most popular option can sometimes be the consensus pick. RCV does that.
In that sense, Diwali might just be the most practical choice for a national holiday week. Even if it’s not everyone’s top festival, it’s widely celebrated across the country in one form or another. If companies ever consider a uniform week off, Diwali could be that middle ground—a festival most people can get behind, even if it’s not their first pick.
So maybe Diwali really is the “Python” of festivals: rarely the absolute favourite but versatile enough to work well for almost everyone.
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