Slashdot Mirror
Guido van Rossum Interviewed
Qa1 writes "Guido von Rossum, creator of Python, was recently interviewed by the folks at O'Reilly Network.
In this interview he discusses his view of the future of Python and the Open Source community and programming languages in general. Some more personal stuff is also mentioned, like his recent job change (including the Slashdot story about it) and a little about how he manages to fit developing Python into his busy schedule."
That's what says in the link to the Python tutorial. It's quite good to get you to know the language and does not require a lot of previous programming experience. Then, the library reference can come very handy too.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
I learnt from the book "Python Essential Reference" - see Amazon's page. It has an excellent first chapter which will give you an excellent grasp of the fundamentals. Good luck, and have fun :o)
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I highly recommend Dive into Python, a free online book that's targeted at experienced programmers.
Sure you can do the same things in other languages, at the end all general languages are Turing Machine equivalent. The difference is that Python is EASY to read (according to Master Yoda). It is bottom-up designed to be.
So it is good not only for scripting, but too for prototyping and for everything which needs to be flexible and not too much efficiency-critical. The logic of some videogames is encoded in Python, you know.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
You might find Eric S. Raymond's take on the question quite informative.
Note: my knowledge of python is somewhat limited as I just started using it, so if there are errors here, I apologize.
1. Python as a scripting language has several features seen in Objective C(and other similar languages) not found in C++. Class members can be detected and bound at runtime, further it's possible to search a classes members for information.
2. Pydoc and documentation strings. Python has built in support for documentation strings, and a great utility for automatically generating documentation. Documentation is actually a part of the programming language, and not an after-market add-on.
3. Dictionary objects, tuples, lists - are all part of the basic language. Dictionary objects allow interesting hash tables to be created without much effort at all. This feature is seen in Perl.
4. Maybe a miss feature, but enforced indentation creates much easier to read code.
5a. The shelf object. This essentially allows any object to have it's runtime information stored in an easy and effecient matter. It can then be reloaded after a run.
5b. The pickle object again allows objects to easily be stored in files.
6. Python is _EXTREMELY_ easy to extend using the Python C API.
7. Python includes functional programming aspects such as mapping and lambda forms.
8. Python includes an extremely complete library that does just about everything one would desire to be able to do. Using the python runtime library allows your code to be easily portable without the headaches involved in C/C++ porting.
9. Using psyco, it's possible to have Python code JIT on i386 processors. This gives a significant performace boost.
10. A development community and support community second to none.
There are other aspects that I haven't touched on here, but these are the major things I've found helpful so far.
As a CS major, the intro CS classes at my school recently switched from teaching Java to Python. The class is designed to teach the fundamentals of computer science and computer pogramming. Python is extremely easy to learn, and quite powerful. We used the free text How to Think Like a Computer Scientist as the course textbook. I recommend this text to anyone interested in learning Python as a first programming language.
Not really. 2.2 and up get a little closer to that, but Python is really a procedural language with a very nice but very optional set of OO features. (Internally, the Python and Perl OO implementaions are very similar, even if Perl's hideous object syntax does a good job of hiding it.) This is a nice pragmatic approach, akin to what Objective C does.
If OO purity is one of those things that appeals to you, Ruby or Smalltalk might be fun toys.
Perl is a better shellscript than shellscript. Systems administrators who are tired of dealing with the horrors of shell script like perl. Perl is also great for text manipulation. One can write insanely powerful and terse code for this in perl (like sed on steroids). People who yank a lot of text around (web developers, sys admins) often like perl for this reason.
Python is more of a "programmers language". You can't write insanely terse code in python, because the python philosophy dictates that the code should be comprehensible. You can still write concise code, but you can't "code in grunts" like you can in perl or bourne shell script.
Python has a cleaner OO model (not bolted on). It's easier to extend (via C or C++). It also makes a good high level wrapper for C or C++ libraries. It is infinitely better than perl for coding GUIs.
That's about all I can think of for now.