Python development time is faster.

[Jordan]

Just a little something I realized after writing the same program in
C++ and python (a simple chat client and server, with one on one and
chat room capabilities).  I used wxwidgets and wxpython respectively
for the GUIs, and they weren't extremely elaborate, just some basic
functionality, a few frames, a few buttons, added a few sound
options... nothing huge ;D   However, making the gui for python took me
less than a fourth of the time it took to make the equivalent (the C++
one was actually a bit worse, there were some things that were
implemented in wxpython that just didn't want to work in wxwidgets).
I'm not saying that coding in python is going to let you develop things
4 times faster, but there are some obvious advantages that I think
greatly increase development rate. Just making the framework for the
C++ gui was very time consuming.  Added to this is that python doesn't
require linking and specifying libraries and all the other things that
tend to go wrong on the first attempt at compiling something. You also
don't have to specify void, int, char etc for functions, and of course,
there's no pointers.  :D     Best thing you can do is probably just to
download python and tinker with it, maybe try making some python
equivalents to whatever you've made in other languages.

Cheers
-Jordan

Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:
> "Chris Brat" <chrisBrat at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > I've seen a few posts, columns and articles which state that one of the
> > advantages of Python is that code can be developed x times faster than
> > languages such as <<Insert popular language name here>>.
> >
> > Does anyone have any comments on that statement from personal
> > experience?
> > How is this comparison measured?
>
> I don't think it can be, objectively - comparing two teams,  one using language
> "a", and the other python, to do  a task, is simply comparing the skill levels
> of the two teams - and using the same team to do the same task in two different
> languages is also misleading, because of the experience gained in the first
> iteration.
>
> Python is actually astonishing - it seems to "fit the brain" of a large number
> of people - it is very easy to get started with, and is rich enough to keep
> surprising you - even after considerable time hacking around with it.
> It can do OO, but you can also write procedures in it, and you can even mix the
> two in the same module, and most of the time it "just works" - and when it
> doesn't, it is normally very easy to teach yourself what you are doing wrong by
> playing at the interactive interpreter prompt.  This makes for productivity, as
> you can write quite complex things in a day or so, from scratch, such as:
>
> A single pass "assembler" for a virtual machine with 33 instructions - from
> nothing to running, fully debugged, in two days.
>
> A simple sliding window protocol - coded up from nothing in four days - mostly
> spent staring into space, imagining problems, instead of coding... so the
> "design" time is included... but its not working yet, as I have to write the
> other side in assembler on a very small machine, which would normally have taken
> me almost a month, but that will now probably take about two weeks, as I have
> the Python code to translate...
>
> And I am not a guru on this group, and I have just idly mucked around with
> Python for about a year in real time, not doing it full time, or making any real
> effort to study the language formally beyond lurking here - there are other
> people here on this group who, I am sure, could beat the hell out of these
> times, both for the design and the coding.
>
> So to sum up my personal perspective - it is very worth while to know a little
> python, even if you just use it as a prototyping language - it gets you going
> rapidly...
> 
> - Hendrik