Long Live Python!

[James_Althoff at i2.com]

Dennis Roark wrote:
>James_Althoff at i2.com wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>What is it about Python that would, in your experience, make it only
"good
>>for short programs <100 lines".
>>
>>Jim
>>
>
>Lack of type safety; lack of forcing variable names to be
>declared before use.  (In a long program, how hard it is to
>find a bug that is simply the misspelling of a variable!)

Have you actually found either of these *really* to be a problem in writing
longer programs -- in *actual* practice, I mean?  I ask because I haven't
found either to be a show-stopper.

Specifically, I *do* misspell variable names.  And in my experience,
misspelled variable names are pretty easy to find.  One case where this is
less so is when you misspell something in an exception handler (for
example) and then *never* exercise that exception case.  On the other hand,
I consider such a thing to be a very bad practice anyway (the "never
exercising part" ;-)  My experience has been that the *hard* problems in
big programs are *way* beyond anything that a compile can detect.

Again, we are shipping production code with > 100,000 lines of Jython and
neither "Lack of type safety" (by this I assume you mean "compile-time,
static, type checking") nor "lack of forcing variable names to be declared
before use" were problems for us.  So, though I am not against the general
notion of making it possible to detect errors as early as possible (e.g.,
at compile time) I don't see today's Python as being unsuitable for large
program.  In fact, I see Python as being *very* suitable for large
programs.  And I say this from the perspective of having already written
large program using Python.  :-)

Jim

>
>I really like Python, but for at least the reasons above, I
>can't see it for long programs.
>
>---------------------------------
>Dennis Roark
>Dept. of Computer Science
>University of Sioux Falls