Where python especially good ?

[Jonathan Hogg]

On 2/7/2002 9:02, in article afrmbm$d28$07$1 at news.t-online.com, "Andrey
Koubychev" <email at vtc.ru> wrote:

> What do you think, at what tasks pythons shows great benefits comparing to
> other script languages ?

I think the Python language shows its greatest strength when you aren't
writing scripts ;-)

Seriously, I don't think of Python as a scripting language the way I'd think
of perl or sh or awk. I view it as a systems programming language, and some
fair size systems have been written in it.

The main advantages of it to me are speed of development and ease of
maintenance. I think Python has the edge over other "scripting" languages in
both of these areas: it has an interactive interpreter; it is strongly, but
simply, object-oriented (Perl doesn't come close here); it has a very good
standard library; Python code tends to be readable.

I think comparing Python to Java is fairer, and I find Python to be a much
more pleasant language to work with.

[When I was doing my last big Java project, we prototyped the whole thing in
Python first then re-coded it into Java. Even during the Java development I
used Jython to test and explore the Java code.]

If you just want to munge a log file with some heavy regular expressions and
spit out some statistics or something, then you might be better off with
Perl. But if you want to write a program, look at Python.

Jonathan