"The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language"

[John Salerno]

There is an article on oreilly.net's OnLamp site called "The World's 
Most Maintainable Programming Language" 
(http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/03/the_worlds_most_maintainable_p.html). 


It's not about a specific language, but about the qualities that would 
make up the title language (learnability, consistency, simplicity, 
power, enforcing good programming practices). I thought this might be of 
interest to some of you, and I thought I'd point out the two places 
where Python was mentioned:

from Part 4, Power:
"Of course (second point), a language that requires users to extend it 
to be productive has already failed, unless it can enforce that there is 
one obvious solution to any problem and autonomously subsume the first 
working solution into the core language or library. Python is a good 
example of this practice. There is a strong polycultural subcommunity in 
the world of free and open source, and the members of this group 
consider the lack of competing projects in Python (one XML parser, one 
logging library, one networking toolkit) to be counterintuitive and even 
counter to the goal of language progress. They’re wrong; this is 
actually a strong force for cohesion in the language and community, 
where the correct answer to a novice’s question of “How can I parse 
XML?”, “How can I publish a database-driven web site?”, or even “How can 
I integrate the legacy system of an acquired company from a different 
industry with our existing legacy system?” (to prove that this principle 
does not only apply to small or toy problems) is usually “Someone else 
has already implemented the correct solution to that problem — it is 
part of the standard library.”"

from Part 5, Enforcing Good Programming Practices:
"Having a comprehensive standard library helps alleviate this problem to 
some degree for many languages. Consider how PHP and Java have both 
avoided the trouble of conflicting addons by aggressively integrating 
new features into the language. (Of course, Python has done a similar 
job through a rigorous set of community procedures, but that’s difficult 
— though not impossible — to emulate in a parser and compiler.)"