C++ bad-mouthing (was: Why learn Python ??)

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid>:
...
| The one attempt I know of to write a substantial Python application
| competitive with similar applications written in C was the Grail web
| browser, and AFAIK that was a complete failure.  However, for small to
| medium sized projects which don't have to run fast, Python is great.

Well, egads.  Grail is a Python/Tcl/Tk hybrid, and I think one
of the problems with that it complicates the optimization phase.
Plus the official objective never did seem to be to compete with
similar applications, rather they would say they were primarily
writing a document viewing tool for CRNI and it was just a coincidence
that it happened to be a nice web browser.  Was a bit slow, but did
have some nice touches.

But at any rate, I thought we were talking about huge projects
involving many programmers, and I don't think Grail was of that
sort at all.  I don't know what kind of programmer resources were
allocated to it, but I bet it was actually a smashing success in
those terms.  As for its size, I'd have to look, I have the code
around somewhere, but I'd guess it was smaller than Mailman or Zope.
Small enough that one programmer could become pretty thoroughly
acquainted with the whole thing.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com