Why is python not written in C++ ?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2010-08-04, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> writes:
>
>> Yep, I've installed Gnat a couple times with the intention of playing
>> around with it, but there's pretty much zero chance I could sell it
>> at the office in place of C/C++ for embedded stuff, 
>
> I wonder what the issues are.

The issue that would prevent its use where I work is the inability to
hire anybody who knows Ada.  You can't hire anybody who knows C++
either, but you can hire lots of people who claim they do.  [I'm not
convinced that there are more than about 6 people on the planet who
know C++ well enough that they should be writing real projects in it.]

That said, the last time I looked the Ada spec was only something like
100 pages long, so a case could be made that it won't take long to
learn.  I don't know how long the C++ language spec is, but I'm
betting it's closer to 1000 than 100.  But I failed when I tried to
get people to use Python, so I doubt I'd have any better luck with
Ada.

> From everything I've heard, it's a pretty good compiler.

I think it's probably a very good compiler.  It's the compiler users
that are the issue.

> It does ok against C/C++ in the Alioth shootouts.  I haven't written
> anything in it beyond "hello world" but I've looked at the wikibook
> about it and that intro piece that I linked earlier.  It's more
> verbose than C,

The verbosity always bugged me a little.  To my eyes all the sugar
gets in the way of seeing the code.  Somebody should invent a language
where indentation defines the blocks.

> so coding in it takes more keystrokes, but it looks to me like the
> general coding approach (modulo the extra keystrokes) should be
> similar to that of C, Algol, and so on, and the results should be
> quite a bit more reliable.  

Indeed.

> Mozilla is fed up with C++ and seems to be working on its own language,
> called Rust:
>
>    http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4009 

Great!  The world needs one more computer language...

-- 
Grant