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 highly recommend Dive into Python, a free online book that's targeted at experienced programmers.
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.
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.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.