Python vs. VB

[Bill Tutt]

> From: roystephan at yahoo.com [mailto:roystephan at yahoo.com]
> 
> My company is mostly a VB shop.  Web Development has gotten away with
> Perl in a corner but we are now being urged to move to ASP.  I am
> pushing for PerlScript interfacing heavily with COM.  
> 
> I would like the COM objects to be implemented in Python rather than
> VB.  
> 

Speaking as one who has written VB COM objects that live inside of IIS, just
don't do it.

You can't debug VB from within IIS to save your life. Python certainly has a
much better COM story than Perl does by a long shot. You can actually debug
your Python COM components inside of IIS. (using Mark Hammond's cool Win32
debugger)

(I'm ignoring the fact that I don't know enough about your business to make
a sensible or even indeed accurate guess as to whether or not you should use
ASP or not. You should definitely check out Zope whatever you do at:
http://www.zope.org/ )

IF you do decide to go with ASP, insist on your web servers running NT 4
SP4. SP4 contains some fixes that should help ASP on the speed front. (It
reduces contention on NT's per process heap lock.)

[.....]
> Are there any existing comparisons/benchmarks?  Is there anyone out
> there who has won a similar battle?
> 

Comparisons/benchmarks against what? You haven't really said... :)
ASP actually is a fairly decent (and simplistic) web development platform.
It is right for certain sets of web development problems. Like anything
however, it isn't a panacea.

If your projects are of any size, I'd tend to strongly discourage Perl in
favor of Python at the minimum. Its certainly a much cleaner syntax, (and
thus hopefully far more maintainable in the long term) has much better COM
support. Oh yeah, Python's COM support is free. You have to shell out money
for the Perl Resource Kit to write COM objects last I looked.

> Thank you for your time.
> --Roy
> 


Bill
--
No, I'm not part of support.
No, I'm not part of developer relations.
No, I don't get paid to read comp.lang.python. (if only)
No, I don't even get paid to write Python. *sniffle*
No, I'm not part of Microsoft's PR machine.
I'm just some schmoe programmer who likes Python. :)