Know of Substantial Apps Written in Python?

[Grant Griffin]

Dry Ice wrote:
> 
...
> What "substantial" is might be defined in terms
> of project length.  Perhaps something which would
> take a good programmer several months.

If you measure "substantial" in terms of months, the answer is a
no-brainer.  Yup, legions of folks have "been there, done that".

For example, I did a Python project recently which grew "organically",
in spurts, over a period of about a year; it probably took several
months of total work.  The project was one of those things that nobody
really planned to do, but just needed doing.  It started out small and
grew bigger with each feature request.  In terms of Python code,
features grew into functions, functions grew into classes, classes grew
into modules, and modules grew into libraries.

Even though the project had not been planned whatsoever in advance,
virtually no code got thrown away: it was always a forward process. 
Python code wears well.

> Something as complex as a web browser might do,
> if the language in question does not merely act as
> glue for modules written in C or whatever.

Rumor has it that Google is implemented in Python.  (OK, maybe not _all_
of it. <wink>)

> In the end, this is like evaluating people.  We can
> listen to what others say about a person, or what a
> person says about his or her self- or we can simply
> see how they BEHAVE.

Then you probably won't be much intersted in what I'm about to say.
<wink>

A related question that is often asked about a programming language is,
"does it scale well"?  To that, I think the answer for Python is
definitely "yes", because:

- It is extremly readable--more so than any other programming language
I've seen.  (I can't think of anything that might constrain complexity
more than Humans not being able to understand something.  Take Perl, for
example. <wink>)
- It supports namespaces: you can write large pieces of code that don't
conflict with each other.
- It's extensible and embed-able: if you need more speed or whatever,
you can get it.

In fact, if we turn your question around to consider what might _limit_
complexity (in the extreme), the only thing I can think of is Python's
lack of a formal interface mechanism.  (For more about that, see PEP
245, at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0245.html.)  It's no
coincidence that this issue is of interest to the Zope folks.

complex-is-better-than-complicated-ly y'rs,

=g2
-- 
_____________________________________________________________________

Grant R. Griffin                                       g2 at dspguru.com
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