Long Live Python!

[Paul Prescod]

Dennis Roark wrote:
> 
> James_Althoff at i2.com wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> >What is it about Python that would, in your experience, make it only "good
> >for short programs <100 lines".
> >
> >Jim
> >
> 
> Lack of type safety; lack of forcing variable names to be
> declared before use.  

There are many of us out there like James who have used Python to build
very large systems. Is your faith in static typing so strong that it
overwhelms the clear evidence to the contrary?

Python allows you to build larger systems because it allows a looser
binding between granular components, it allows more to be done in less
code and it makes testing so much easier that the loss of compiler
warnings is trivial.

> (In a long program, how hard it is to
> find a bug that is simply the misspelling of a variable!)

No, it isn't hard to find a misspelled variable in a program. That's
what unit tests (and, ideally, code coverage tools) are for. If you
don't have good unit tests, it is going to be very hard to write robust
code in any language.

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