Python Included In ArcGIS 9

Party_Pack writes "ESRI, the makers of the GIS (Geographic Information System) Arc/INFO (as well as ArcView) and its more modern COM based successor ArcGIS are once again, in the just released ArcGIS 9, giving their users the choice of a fully featured scripting language rather than just the hideously complex ArcObjects/full programming language model they currently offer. Interestingly they have chosen to move away from their tradition of proprietary languages such as AML and Avenue and use Python. This is great news for both ArcGIS users and the Python community, as ESRI will hopefully feed any development work back into the community."

Comments

Naive submitter.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great news for both ArcGIS users and the Python community, as ESRI will hopefully feed any development work back into the community

Why should they be expected to? Python is under the BSD licence. And I would not expect an application of the language to be making changes and additions to that language. The language drives them, not the other way around. They should be keeping compatibility with Python.

The I expect them to contribute is possibly a bug report or two - maybe even a very minor fix - but it's stupid to expect anything other than that. Python is a mature language that they're using as a convenience for themselves and their users. It's going to be so that they can think less about their scripting language. Nothing more.

I suspect the submitter is a little naive and possibly new to the world of commercial software.

Re:Python/ArcObjects Code Samples

[Teddy Caddy]

I get a newletter from ESRI and I have gotten it for the past 4-5 years. They ran an article about 8-12 months ago talking about python and how you can use it to write customized stuff for ArcView and ArcGIS. So I think you can use python with older ESRI software and I think that a lot of demo or tutorial python stuff is out there.