Language Suitablilty

[Ryan Paul]

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004 21:00:19 +0200, Jens Thiede wrote:

> I'd like to know what other people think about Python. In particular, what
> is Python best suited for?
> 
> I've been using Python for a little while now and in my opinion Python is a
> great all-terrain language. I would describe it as concrete scaffolding. 
> 
> Could anyone comment on how Python fares against C++, Java and Perl?
> 
> Jens.

In my experience, python is almost always more practical than java. The
python vs. c++ comparison is an interesting issue. I strongly dislike c++,
and avoid it wherever possible. In certain cases, python is not fast
enough for what I need to do. When I need fast execution and static
typing, I write a library in OCaml and write a python wrapper for it.

Python is a great language for text processing. It is also very good at
dealing with databases and xml. In many cases, python is also an
excellent choice for a complex web application (just look at zope!)
Python's greatest strengths, in my opinion, are its simplicity and its
introspective power.

Perl is really a very useful and powerful tool in its own right, and there
are some places were it can be a better choice than python, particularly
the shell. I still use perl one-liners from the command line almost every
day. I recently started learning ruby, and I personally feel that for
shell scripts, ruby is a better choice than perl or python - it is an
elegant compromise between the two. If I want to use regular expressions,
I almost always use ruby or perl instead of python.

-- SegPhault