Why Python?

[John Hunter]

>>>>> "Todd7" == Todd7  <Nospam at please.com> writes:

    Todd7> What makes it better or worse than languages like perl,
    Todd7> php, delphi, or c++?

perl - both python and perl have many, many external modules written
for them.  perl *may* have more.  Some people like that perl has CPAN,
a central repository for modules.  In my opinion, this is not so
important now that we have google.  python is object oriented in its
bones; with perl, OO is a hack.  python favors a clean, simple,
obvious syntax, perl embraces "there is more that one way to do it."
For this reason, most python coders feel that python code is easier to
read and maintain.  

php - widely used for web development and has a lot of nice packages
in this niche - bulletin boards, database interfaces, and so on.
python will have packages for each of these areas, but they are not as
widely used and are not industry standard, in the way for example that
phymyadmin is.  php is not as powerful a programming language as
python is and is not widely used outside the sphere of web
development.  See the recent thread
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=404269dc%240%2421674%24636a15ce%40news.free.fr&rnum=2&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dphp%2Bgroup:*python*%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26scoring%3Dd

c++ - a big, powerful, complex language.  Good for designing complex
software packages and code where performance is important.  Makes
things like file IO, dbase and web connectivity harder than they need
to be. Many who use python favor a mixed language programming style:
use python for most everything, and write (or reuse) C/C++/FORTRAN
extensions for processor/performance intensive parts.  There are many
good tools (SWIG, F2Py, boost::python, etc) for automating the process
of creating python extensions of code from these other languages.  If
you need high performance code, it's good to know how to write code in
at least one of these compiled languages.

My advice: learn python first.  The community is very friendly and
receptive to newcomers (you won't find this on perl or C++
newsgroups).  You'll get advice from world experts on coding and
style.  python coders value elegant, readable, efficient, well written
code and will give you lots of advice along these lines.

JDH