Suitability of Python for a Big Application?

[William Park]

On Sun, Dec 12, 1999 at 08:11:57PM +0000, bobyu5 at mailcity.com wrote:

...
> But it does not for now, so I settled down on Python; however, I have 2
> remaining issues on Python.

I think you made the right choice.

> 
> 1) GUI library: I tried to look at TK library and the look and feel was
> not as sleek as what comes with Windows; plus it felt very slow.
> 2) Math operation: there is a possibility that some heavy duty
> calculation would have to be performed on around 100,000 rows of data
> using Python - how slow would this be?
> 3) Heavy duty text processing using regexp (at least 40MB big)- I know
> Perl is really fast in this regard; is Python as fast?
> 
> For 1) I thought I could solve this problem by using Zope - I get
> instantly a GUI that is based upon web browsers. This eliminates those
> annoying installation problems with customized DLLs as I found out using
> VB development approach.

I can't help you here.  I tried to read Zope's documentations, but I
couldn't make head or tail out of it.  

> 
> For 2) I am hoping that the Python Math Lib exists and that it is very
> good.

There is NumPy package which is wrapper around Fortran libraries.  But,
it's usually for vector, matrix, and linear system stuffs.  There are
other numerical modules written by many people.  If you are talking
about arithmatic math, then even native Python code will suffice.

> 
> For 3) I am also hoping that Python Regexp Lib is good.

Python 're' module probably is not as fast as Perl's.  But, it's decent.

> 
> Are my assumptions valid? Am I missing anything? Originally we wanted to
> have Outlook like UI - is this kind of UI possible to build using Python
> and its libraries?
> 
> Everybody seems to be using C++ or Java for projects of this scope; has
> anybody tried to do something similar using Python, or even Perl?
> 
> Any anecdotes or recommendations would be heartily appreciated!