python vs c#

[G. S. Hayes]

Max M <maxm at mxm.dk> wrote in message news:<41513aac$0$285$edfadb0f at dread12.news.tele.dk>...

> When writing big systems, it is nice to be able to have an enviroment to 

> code in. Eg. an IDE.



Wow, I actually find this backwards; IDEs often look good for small
projects, but don't scale up (especially to large, multiplatform
projects) very well in my experience.



Which goes to show that it's really a matter of personal taste.

 

> I have a feeling that the typelessness of Python can make this harder. 

> Wrappers on top of wrappers on top of som kind unknown data type can be 

> really hard to trace.



Dynamic typing is probably the biggest defining characteristic of
Python; personally, it's one of the very first language features I
consider when I'm figuring out what language to use for a job.



I agree that intellisense-style tools are easier to write for
statically typed languages, but that's a very small advantage when
weighed against the advantages of dynamic typic (or against other,
more interesting advantages of static typing), IMO.



> This is an issue when the system get's a lot bigger than the language.



I'm not sure what you mean by this, I can't really imagine a system
"bigger than Python" in the sense of "so big that Python was a bad
choice for implementation" or "so big that Python started to get in
the way/didn't support development/etc".



Right now we have a team of developers working on a system that
includes 250,000 lines of Python code; admittedly, some of that (maybe
30,000 lines) is machine generated, but the majority is not.



The language hasn't been a problem for us--indeed, I think it's helped
tremendously in terms of keeping the team small and yet still allow
for rapid development--and I don't see any reason that it would be a
problem on a project 10 or 100 times that size.