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."

Comments

Re:Can anyone

[JanneM]

Depends on what you mean.

Python, Perl and Ruby are all very good interpreted, flexible, rapid-prototyping languages. They all have their relative strengths and weaknesses, but all are good enough that if you are choosing between them, it boils down pretty much to your own preferences and what coworkers and other people around you use (or on what animal you prefer on the cover of your reference literature:) ).

If you mean this class of languages as opposed to C, C++, Java and so on, well, it becomes a matter of what you want to accomplish. The great benefits of these interpreted languages are that they make development very fast, compared to the more traditional languages (yes, Java is interpreted, but it is still designed as a traditional language). You spend more time solving your task and less time managing the mechanics of development. Also, they really make use of the benefits of being interpreted with things like closures, dynamic code evaluation and so on. And they typically have very complete, transparent access to the surrounding system - why spend two days writing some hairy functionality when you can trivially filter your data through an external application that already does the whole job for you? Do not underestimate "scripting type glue".

They do make a pretty good fit running large systems - the Swedish pension management system is all written in Perl, for instance, and Zope is written in Python. They are also quite efficient; they are on the whole as fast as a Java implementation, and occasionally (when the task plays to the specific language's strengths), quite a bit faster.

I typically use C/C++ and Perl for development, and every time I've been using Perl for a while, I get bouts of frustration with traditional languages for the lack of such things as hash datatypes and inline regular expressions. But for some tasks, traditional languages are the way to go.