large-scale app development in python?

[Nicodemus]

Hi Gabor,

gabor wrote:

>hi,
>  
>

<snip other points that were already adressed in other responses>

>or python simply isn't suited to write bigger (more complex) apps?
>

In our company, we work with scientific software, mostly in the area of 
oil extraction. Our applications were being developed only in C++, and 
since the beginning of the year, we have switched to a Python/C++ 
approach, and we are *very* impressed.

Our applications are being developed *much* quickly, features can be 
added very fast, and the Python code is at least 1/5th of the equivalent 
C++ code. Plus, thanks to Python simplicity and elegance, the code is 
much more readable and easy to understand.

We implement the heavy duty processes in C++, and export those to Python 
using Boost.Python, and the performance is just great, ie, we can't see 
any difference between an application written entirely in C++ and other 
in Python/C++. We were a little worried that our application would be 
slower because of Python, but that just didn't happen, and more and more 
code that we thought we would have to implement in C++ ended up being 
implemented in Python anyway.

We have a limited use of unit tests (we're still adapting to that), but 
event then we have very few of the problems you mentioned, like changing 
the name of method. And I'm confident that this problems would disappear 
if we could count on a comprehensive test suite. So, in practice, this 
is not a problem at all.

In our experience, Python is more than suitable to develop large-scale 
applications. 8)

Regards,
Nicodemus.