Why would I learn Python over other languages?

[Paul Rubin]

"Charif Lakchiri" <charif at kuc.biglobe.ne.jp> writes:
> Now here are my questions:
> It is easy to learn?

For the most part I'd say yes.

> Does it support GUI programming?

Hmm, yes, although the official GUI toolkit (tkinter) is cumbersome,
doesn't look so great on the screen, and is poorly documented.

> Does it support server-side programming, say for web apps?

There's a cgi module.  There's various third party packages for fancier
types of web apps.

> Does it have extensions and libraries, say for DB connectivity,
> serial com or network programming...?

There are reasonably good libraries included for various network protocols.
There are third party extensions for DB connectivity and serial com.

> Can it be used for administrative tasks, say as perl...?

Sure, so can any language.  I'd say it's generally simpler to toss off
a 5-line perl script for some admin task than a comparable Python
script.  Python is better for somewhat more complex tasks, where Perl
programs start getting hopelessly disorganized.

> Also, can it be compiled to native code?

There's a JIT compiler called psyco which isn't yet officially part of
Python but which is coming along nicely.  There's no ahead-of-time
native code compiler and the language doesn't lend itself very well to
that.

> Also much appreciated would be simple comparisons with say JAVA (my other 
> candidate), and pointers to sites and docs where to start.

www.python.org