Can Python replace Visual Basic? Should it?

[Steve Holden]

"Don Dwiggins" <dwig at advancedmp.net> wrote in message
news:mailman.984010931.26257.python-list at python.org...
[ ... ]
> I'd say go for it -- get the Python on Windows book and convert one of
your
> VB, Powerbuilder, or Delphi projects to Python and see what you think (or
if
> you're adventurous, just use the documentation included in the
> distribution).  I converted one of our ASP pages to Python from VBScript
to
> see if it would be faster (it wasn't), and was pleasantly surprised at how
> easy it was.
>
The main problem here is the overhead of starting the Python interpreter
(and recompiling the top-level script) each time a page is called. I've done
some work with Xitami to develop long-running web processes to server HTML
from realational data, and the speedup was, to say the least, startling.

My results may not translate to IIS, though, since I did this on the road
using Win98 and PWS. YMMV.

Of course, structuring your scripts so they just call a function in an
imported module will win you some performance, since then most everything is
pre-compiled into a .pyc.

> I should say, though, that we haven't used any of the GUI toolkits --
maybe
> someone else can recommend the best one to use when migrating from VB
Forms.
>
I haven't yet seen anything that stirs me, but it's early days yet.
BlackAdder looks promising, though they could certainly use an interface
design consultant on their own product...

regards
 Steve