The Industry choice

[Paul Rubin]

Christopher Koppler <klapotec at chello.at> writes:
> >> 2. "plausible but there are sound technical reasons to be wary"
> > 
> > A security-critical financial application.
> 
> Why, specifically? Would you need to eval user input?

Static typing, checked exceptions, etc.
> 
> I haven't used those either (well, I looked at some, but I generally
> feel better at home in Emacs or even Idle than some glitzy IDE), but
> I find Python's debugging facilities completely sufficient,
> especially since I nearly never use them ;-) The interactive
> environment and unit testing are just great for whatever I've needed
> so far. But then I haven't used Python in a really *large* project
> yet, either.

I think it's partly a matter of development style.  I like debuggers
where some people prefer print statements.  IDLE's debugging features
were very crude, and IDLE locked up all the time or left stray threads
around when I used it.

There's lots of times when I have a cool programming idea, and find
when I sit down at the computer that I can implement the main points
of the idea and get a neat demo running rather quickly.  That creates
a very happy, liberating feeling, plus gives me something to show off
to friends or co-workers.  But turning it into a finished product with
no rough edges is an order of magnitude more work.  It seems to me
that IDLE and a lot of the rest of Python are examples of someone
having a cool idea and writing a demo, then releasing it with a lot of
missing components and rough edges, without realizing that it can't
reasonably be called complete without a lot more work.