A little disappointed so far

[Dave Benjamin]

In article <bafs04$c20$1 at panix3.panix.com>, Aahz wrote:
> In article <slrnbcm7n7.kfe.ramen at lackingtalent.com>,
> Dave Benjamin  <ramen at lackingtalent.com> wrote:
>>Sometimes, "scalability" means being able to scale down. I think this is
>>often forgotten in these "enterprise" days... =)
> 
> Sure, though Python scales down much more than Java does, for example.
> I prefer sticking with one language.

No doubt, and not just in terms of the language itself. Starting Java from
the command line to run a quick, small app still has a noticable delay. It
really gets in the way of the UN*X philosophy of simple tools that do
specific tasks and can be assembled with pipes and filters to build more
complex operations.

Advocates seem to justify this by saying that most people use Java to
write servlets and other long-running processes, so the startup time is not
an issue. But there's no reason why this has to be the case; Java's style
most resembles C++, which has minimal startup time since it's compiled and
sticks to a "features you don't use should cost you nothing" policy.

(I prefer the freedom to use any language appropriate to the task.)

> If one wants to be somewhat unpythonic while sticking with Python, one
> could write a module called mycgi that did a bunch of imports, then do
> "from mycgi import *".

Or, use a package and put all the common imports in __init__.py. This has
the additional advantage of allowing for a quick'n'dirty testing environment
by running the python interpreter in the package directory and typing
"from __init__ import *".

But maybe you didn't hear that from me. ;)

Peace,
Dave