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Python Moving into the Enterprise
Qa1 writes "Seems that Python is moving into the enterprise. At the recent PyCon it has become apparent that it's not just Google, GIS, Nokia or even Microsoft anymore. The article points out that Python is increasingly becoming a perfectly viable and even preferred choice for the enterprise. More and more companies are looking at Python as a good alternative to past favorites like Java. Will we finally be able to code for living in a language that's not painful? Exciting times!"
I work at an Application Service Provider startup with 16 employees (5 developers) using Python (30K lines+).
I have 6 years of Perl development plus another 8 in C. So, a newcomer to Python (about 2 months now), I have several reactions shaded by that experience:
* Nice syntax: Not perfect, but very passable overall.
* Love the no-brackets: Indentation as a means of delineating code blocks is great; there's no debate over where to put squiggly braces (the 'if test { statement; } stuff;
* Immature toolsets: there are very few mature toolsets yet. We're using SQLObject, which is in version 0.6, as an object-relational-mapper. It's got some limitations and is admittedly not 'enterprise ready'. it's hard to compare to the Perl DBI because the dbi just is an interface and doesn't do mapping.
* Lack of CPAN: the single most fantastic "tool" I've found in my programming career (15 years) has been CPAN. Got a problem? Someone has probably already seen it and started a solution. I know this is in the works for Python but the tools are not all there yet.
* Syntax (bad): Lack of a requirement to declare vars before use. I really would like the ability to require that all vars are explicitly declared before being assigned to. it would help coding reliability.
Just my 5 cents.
-- Kevin
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