Reasons to use ironpython
Hi: My background is primarily UNIX. I have been programming in C, TCL, Perl, and Python in UNIX and Linux for a long time. I recently started working in Visual Studio and C#. Visual Studio and C# make everything very easy. Python was nice when you didn't have the convenience of Visual Studio and intellisense with a nice debugger. In the windows world I see no major reason not to use C#. Why would I want to use IronPython? Thanks Matthew Harelick
Hello Matthew, Why send an email about IronPython to the Python.NET mailing list? (Sorry for multiple replies by the way - my client went bat-crazy on me.) Both Python and C# are 'general purpose' programming langugages suited to a wide range of problem domains. Choice of programming language is therefore *usually* a matter of aesthetics, what you are used to, personal workflow, issues within a team and so on rather than a matter of which is more appropriate to the job. Obviously there are exceptions where one language is obviously more appropriate or obviously inappropriate but these are the exception rather than the rule. Place where you should *obviously* use IronPython: * For embedding as a user scripting language / plugin mechanism or are doing runtime code generation Place where you should obviously use C#: * You have already implemented in a dynamic language, profiled and optimised, and *need* faster performance than the dynamic language is capable of Other than that the choice is yours! Reasons why I / some people prefer IronPython: * The interactive environment is an invaluable tool for exploration * No need to create a whole 'object-oriented-application' for simple tasks where it is not needed * Without a compile phase and with duck typing / dynamic typing IronPython makes it *dramatically* easier to do test driven development or even normal unit testing * Python has many language capabilities missing from C# which make it a flexible and concise language. These include: - Duck typing (no need for interfaces) - Heterogeneous containers (no need for generics) - Pain free introspection (no need for the complexity inherent in System.Reflection) - Metaprogramming including good old eval, type creation at runtime, decorators and descriptors - Late binding and runtime type dispatch - 'Little features' like tuple unpacking, returning multiple values, everything is an object (including primitives, functions, classes and modules) There are things that C# has that Python doesn't (compile time checking, method overloading, access to .NET attributes), but choose whichever you prefer. :-) Michael Harelick, Matthew wrote:
Hi:
My background is primarily UNIX. I have been programming in C, TCL, Perl, and Python in UNIX and Linux for a long time.
I recently started working in Visual Studio and C#.
Visual Studio and C# make everything very easy. Python was nice when you didn’t have the convenience of Visual Studio and intellisense with a nice debugger.
In the windows world I see no major reason not to use C#.
Why would I want to use IronPython?
Thanks
Matthew Harelick
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participants (2)
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Harelick, Matthew
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Michael Foord