Defending the Python lanuage...

[Rony]

I din't answer all the answers one by one because they all make a
point somehow ... but seem to miss my point. Perhaps i wasn't clear
enough, this could be because english is not my native language.

What i mean is that IMHO very often the wrong questions are aked here,
or perhaps it depends of the job of the person who is asking the
question.
I myself i'm a manager of a software developping company, so i see
these from a managment point of view. If, tomorrow, my chief software
engineer comes to me and says "from now on i would like to use
language X for our development", my questions would be :
- Why ? What are the benefits and why should we change or add this
language
- What happens with the thousands of lines of code we wrote for our
standard librarys and wich we are using for every project. And THIS is
a very important question i think, because you're talking money here
(sorry for the open source guys here <wink> ). If, as a company, you
have to trow away a couple of thousand hours of investment because
your development team wants to change you need a serious reason for
this. And this goes even further than that, another point is how good
will it be supported ? Here i don't mean only the language it self but
allso his librarys. Take Python as an example. The language itself is
going trough a *normal* growing cycle and is very well supported, but
imaging that with version Python 3000 (:)the "community" has decided
that the Tkinter library won't be supported any more.. I can assure
you that this would be a very expensive decission for us, our whole
GUI library is based on that now. And isn't this a risk with many open
source projects ?

- What will be the investment for training of our development team and
how much time will it take
- Do we have a 'small ' project we can use as a testcase and what do
we have to do if we where wrong ?!!

As i wanted to point out here there are a couple of other important
questions that are very rarely asked here .... and who are IMHO more
important as question but allso as answer and argument to use Python
than the fact that you don't have to declare variables ... (as a
stupid example)