Why is Python a good first scripting language?

[Paul-Michael Agapow]

Tim Teebken <teebken at yahoo.com> wrote:
> (1)  Clean, terse, easy-to-read syntax.  All subjective terms, and everyone
> will claim these apply to their favorite language, but still it's a
> distinction worth making.  A language that is easier to maintain, and in
> which one can quickly become productive, is more helpful to me right now.

Python encourages a clean layout of code and good documentation. Also,
I've had a lot of success teaching it to non-programmers (i.e
biologists) for use in data manipulation and simulation. People pick it
up fast and it's not daunting to newcomers.

> (4) "Fast enough" performance.  It doesn't have to be faster than competing
> scripting languages, but  shouldn't be radically slower.

Python is probably OK here. We wrote a few prototypes that took several
days to run, but the time hit was acceptable for us because we got the
programs written in a week or so. It took the full Java implementation a
year to catch up.

> (6) Large user base, active developer community, and a large set of free and
> commerical documentation.  In other words, it has a healthy "growth index"
> and bright future relative to near competitors.

Arguably, this was a weak point of Python in the past. The user
community was small, there were few books and there was the danger (in
the beholder's eye) of the langauge fading. This is not the case any
longer.

> (7) Internal consistency and expressiveness.  As with (1), these are
> incredibly fuzzy terms, but the point is to find a language that has not
> just grown by mindless accretion, like many hospital building plans, where
> more "stuff" just gets tacked on in kneejerk reaction over the years.

But enough of Perl, let's talk about Python ... :^)

There are some minor warts in Python IMHO. Of course this all depends on
what you try to do with a langauge, so I can only say that it's never
bothered me.

> grates on me.  Also interesting are some of the functional languages, for
> example Haskell, but I wanted something a bit more mainstream for now.  A
> colleague recommended Ruby, and it does look interesting, although obviously
> it doesn't have the size and extend of the Python community yet.

Haskell is a bit obscure, I agree, and alien to the most common mode of
programming. Ruby is cool and solid, but the developer community is
still small. It's at the point where Python was 3 or 4 years ago.


-- 
Paul-Michael Agapow (news at agapow.net)