Python evangelists unite!

[Jonathan Gardner]

On Friday 30 November 2001 08:18 am, Peter Milliken wrote:
> I use Python as a good, quick and dirty hacking language. For real (read
> production) stuff that I expect a customer to run or will require more than
> a single person working for a couple of hours, I look elsewhere :-). Sure
> there are examples of Python being used for "large" jobs - and very
> successful they have been too - but these people are masochists  (IMO) :-).
> They could have been more productive with other languages that provide
> better support for generic software engineering principles/standards.
>

Au contraire...

I find large projects benefit the most from python. I have a several thousand 
line program that quickly became unmanageable in C++. In python, everything 
just blends together seamlessly. When something goes wrong, I don't have to 
whip out a debugger because it is so easy to read the old code, and I can 
follow it with my finger better than a debugger could.

The parts are extremely interchangeable, modifiable, and reworkable. I can go 
in and change any class, even the design, and it still pretty much works. 
When it doesn't, it is easy enough to debug. And the function parameters? 
THANK HEAVENS that someone has the sense to do what python does when you have 
like 2 million arguments to a function - NAMED PARAMETERS. And one more word: 
dir()/__doc__. Every time I wonder what something does, I boot up the command 
line, import it, and start dir'ing it and __doc__'in it. Without even looking 
at the code, I have figured out the most important parts, because I have 
documented it as I wrote it.

With C/C++ you have messy defines and stuff you have to manage in addition to 
the code. And the code is unreadable, even if you are a professional C++ 
programmer. You have to remember what members there are, whether they are 
protected, public, or private, and whether the other guy is a friend, child 
class, or nobody at all. Not to mention you have to watch the memory and 
freeing it all the time - but not if someone else is still using it! Keep 
reference counts on pieces of data that are dynamic and used by more than one 
pointer; then there is the list/array management that has to go on, the 
off-by-one errors and the every to inevitable type-casting problems... You 
get the idea. It's a lot to remember as you debug old code. It feels like 
building a house with tiny pebbles and little sticks and pieces of string.

> There, that should bring the 'vangelists out of the woodwork! :-) It's just
> too easy, they rise like starving trout - each language has it's strengths
> and weaknesses. Python has some very nice features, I use it a good deal.
> But it definitely has its place!
>

I agree with you that there are limitations to Python; I disagree with you 
that Python was not meant for large projects. 

> In the meantime, my advice is don't get "emotionally" hooked into the
> language. Analyse its strengths and weaknesses, consider other languages
> and their strengths and weaknesses and then you can hold an intelligent
> conversation with another programmer! :-)
>

Exactly. Why do *you* use a language? The answer should always be something 
reasonable. It should never be emotional. Well, unless you are a teenager, 
then everything is emotional. =)

Jonathan