Where python especially good ?

[Pekka Niiranen]

I think python is good for small tools that needs to be developed quickly.
Also, in organizations where people do not have formal education
of programming languages, python syntax is a plus.

However, the current trend of picking best of other languages will eventually
lead to a situation where you have a language which performance and
features are "average". The current trend of adding C-extensions and
inline compilers shows that something is wrong in Python. Also, the bigger
the standard library, the harder to make engineering changes to language
Stackless IS a good idea, but if that cannot be implemented because of the
current userbase, we got a problem.

-pekka-

Jonathan Hogg wrote:

> On 2/7/2002 9:02, in article afrmbm$d28$07$1 at news.t-online.com, "Andrey
> Koubychev" <email at vtc.ru> wrote:
>
> > What do you think, at what tasks pythons shows great benefits comparing to
> > other script languages ?
>
> I think the Python language shows its greatest strength when you aren't
> writing scripts ;-)
>
> Seriously, I don't think of Python as a scripting language the way I'd think
> of perl or sh or awk. I view it as a systems programming language, and some
> fair size systems have been written in it.
>
> The main advantages of it to me are speed of development and ease of
> maintenance. I think Python has the edge over other "scripting" languages in
> both of these areas: it has an interactive interpreter; it is strongly, but
> simply, object-oriented (Perl doesn't come close here); it has a very good
> standard library; Python code tends to be readable.
>
> I think comparing Python to Java is fairer, and I find Python to be a much
> more pleasant language to work with.
>
> [When I was doing my last big Java project, we prototyped the whole thing in
> Python first then re-coded it into Java. Even during the Java development I
> used Jython to test and explore the Java code.]
>
> If you just want to munge a log file with some heavy regular expressions and
> spit out some statistics or something, then you might be better off with
> Perl. But if you want to write a program, look at Python.
>
> Jonathan