How to "wow" someone new to Python

[André Roberge]

On Friday, 16 January 2015 11:04:20 UTC-4, Chris Angelico  wrote:
> Scenario: You're introducing someone to Python for the first time.
> S/he may have some previous programming experience, or may be new to
> the whole idea of giving a computer instructions. You have a couple of
> minutes to show off how awesome Python is. What do you do?
> 
> I was thinking along the lines of a simple demo in the REPL, showing
> off some of Python's coolest features. But then I got stuck on the
> specifics. What are Python's best coolnesses? What makes for a good
> demo?
> 
> Ideally, this should be something that can be demo'd quickly and
> easily, and it should be impressive without going into great details
> of "and see, this is how it works on the inside". So, how would you
> brag about this language?
> 
> ChrisA
If you are willing to install an older version of Python (because the program I am going to mention has not been updated in years ... but it *should* work with 2.6), I'm going to suggest an odd one:  Crunchy!  (ok, I'm biased :-).

The home page is at https://code.google.com/p/crunchy/ where you can find a link to some screencasts (based on an even older version ...)   So, before you install anything, just have a quick look at the screencast to see if it's worthwhile.

A demo using Crunchy seems to  be even more impressive if the person knows some programming.

(Here is what was said about an even older version of Crunchy by people at the Omaha Python group: " Jeff gave a presentation on Crunchy ([WWW]
http://crunchy.sourceforge.net/) Talk about a gee whiz app."  [https://mail.python.org/pipermail/omaha/2007-July/000065.html])

In a nutshell, I would open the official Python tutorial in my browser, showing the official Python tutorial.   (boring)

Then, I would open the exact same page using a browser tab served by Crunchy: "magically" some text-input boxes would have been inserted allowing you to try out the code in the REPL provided by Crunchy.  Then I'd use Crunchy to launch an external app (perhaps a tkinter program), etc.

As I said at the beginning, Crunchy has not been updated in *years* ... more or less since the IPython and Sage notebooks came along...

André