Help: Python for a big commercial project?

[Cliff Wells]

On Wed, 10 Apr 2002 13:24:59 +0200
Cereal Muesli wrote:

>   the people here is not likely to use any free stuff for "serious" 
> development (you know...no money = no quality, sigh!),

And they're using HPUX?  Hm.  I wonder how they'll defend that position once
GNOME is the default desktop on that platform ;)

>   but i want to change this, since I believe that Python is really a very 
> good product. I have played with Python for
>   a year or so under Windows, and before trying to convince people here that 
> it is a good choice, I need to know
>   some things:
> 
> - First of all; do you think that Python is suitable for this
>   kind of "serious, big" project?

Absolutely.  I would not hesitate to use Python for *any* project.  At a prior
job, I used Python develop the primary application for a contract worth over $3
million a year.  In my current position, I am moving our applications from C to
Python and these applications will be responsible for monitoring and
controlling security systems in some high-risk/top-secret facilities (overseas
military installations, government research facilities, etc - if I told you
more, well, you know the line ;)

In fact, I would recommend Python /over/ other languages since its inherent
readability helps prevent subtle programming mistakes.  Even minor flaws in
software can be fatal under the right circumstances and Python helps avoid
these by 1) reducing LOC and 2) encouraging readable code.  While it's clearly
possible to write bad code in any language, Python's nice data types (lists,
dicts, objects in general) and useful libraries help alleviate the need for
clever/complex code (read "unreadable") or often the need to write code at all
(much programming in other languages is spent developing/debugging complex data
structures rather than the application itself).  I have seen (and written)
plenty of C that had more to do with working around limitations imposed by the
compiler than actually solving the problem at hand (worse, I congratulated
myself on these feats ;).  This code would have been totally unnecessary in
Python.

[snip]
Afraid I can't comment on HPUX since I've never used it.

> - Finally: Which version of Python should we use? it seems that
>   1.5.x still rules under *NIX, doesn't it?

I suppose that depends on which Unix.  I use 2.2 on Linux and 1.5.2 on SCO
Unix.

Regards,

-- 
Cliff Wells, Software Engineer
Logiplex Corporation (www.logiplex.net)
(503) 978-6726 x308  (800) 735-0555 x308