comparation of Python with other languages

[David Eppstein]

In article <a2fbil$me1$1 at talia.mad.ttd.net>,
 "Sinule" <s.freud at telelinesssss.es> wrote:

> I am going to give you more information:
> I know C and C++. I am studing some graphics processing librarys and PIL
> (Python image Library) is a good option but I did not know Python language
> and I have to decide which library I am going to use. The project will be
> finish on September (no later).
> 
> Do you think that the program run well on Python and if is necessary with
> any module on C++?
> 
> What your opinion about GUI option with Python aplication?.

It makes a big difference whether the kind of image processing you're doing 
can be covered by functions in PIL or whether you need to roll your own.

When I wanted to learn Python, I chose as my first project a simple GUI 
image processing application: take a folder full of JPEG files, ask for 
titles and captions for each one, grab camera settings from the EXIF data 
in the files, and make them into a web site with images resized for 
individual display as well as thumbnails.  I wasted a few days not getting 
the Mac tkInter GUI library to work, but after I settled on W instead, it 
only took me a couple days of programming to get it working -- it was very 
easy to learn Python, very easy to set up a working user interface, and 
very easy to find and adapt existing code for more complicated parts (like 
the EXIF data).

So, if your project is of a similar nature, September sounds very doable.
On the other hand, if you're doing complicated numerical manipulations of 
large pixel arrays, you might need to recode in C/C++ for efficiency; it 
still would likely be worthwhile using Python for the GUI stuff but I 
couldn't tell you how easy or hard it would be.
-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/