New user's initial thoughts / criticisms of Python

[Tim Chase]

On 2013-11-10 01:27, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > Is everyone happy with the way things are? Could anyone recommend
> > a good, high level language for CGI work? Not sure if I'm going
> > to be happy with Perl (ahhh, get him, he's mentioned Perl and is
> > a heretic!) or Python. I would very much value any constructive
> > criticism or insights.  
> 
> If by CGI you actually literally mean CGI, then most of us don't
> have any experience with it.

While there might be some die-hards in the group that would accuse
you (the OP) of heresy, most folks here are pragmatics that will shrug
and reply "if {Perl,PHP,Ruby,Pike,JavaScript,...} solves your problem,
go for it.  We just can't help you much unless it's Python".  Much
like I'm a vi/vim guy, but if emacs/Sublime/notepad/nano/ed/edlin/cat
works for you, then go for it.

Most of the major frameworks *can* be run as CGI (rather than FastCGI
or WSGI), but performance is usually abysmal because the entire
program is restarted for each request (whereas FCGI/WSGI have
long-running processes that exact the spin-up cost once).  It's more
of a party trick or proof-of-concept than anything you'd want to put
into high-traffic production. Django[1], CherryPy[2], Flask[3],
web.py[4], web2py[5] all support deploying in a CGI environment (it
looks like Pylons/Pyramid might too, but I couldn't scare up a link
for explicit directions).

I'm personally partial to Django because it offers so much out of
the box, but I've done work in a couple of the others too (doing some
CherryPy contract work currently).

-tkc

[1] http://joemaller.com/1467/django-via-cgi-on-shared-hosting/

[2] http://tools.cherrypy.org/wiki/RunAsCGI

[3] http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/deploying/cgi/

[4] http://webpy.org/cookbook/cgi-apache

[5] http://web2py.com/book/default/chapter/13