scaling problems

[Ben Finney]

James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com> writes:

> I am just getting into python, and know little about it

Welcome to Python, and this forum.

> and am posting to ask on what beaches the salt water crocodiles hang
> out.

Heh. You want to avoid them, or hang out with them? :-)

> 1.  Looks to me that python will not scale to very large programs,
> partly because of the lack of static typing, but mostly because there
> is no distinction between creating a new variable and utilizing an
> existing variable,

This seems quite a non sequitur. How do you see a connection between
these properties and "will not scale to large programs"?

> so the interpreter fails to catch typos and name collisions.

These errors are a small subset of possible errors. If writing a large
program, an automated testing suite is essential, and can catch far
more errors than the compiler can hope to catch. If you run a static
code analyser, you'll be notified of unused names and other simple
errors that are often caught by static-declaration compilers.

> I am inclined to suspect that when a successful small python program
> turns into a large python program, it rapidly reaches ninety percent
> complete, and remains ninety percent complete forever.

You may want to look at the Python success stories before suspecting
that, <URL:http://www.python.org/about/success/>.

> 2.  It is not clear to me how a python web application scales.

I'll leave this one for others to speak to; I don't have experience
with large web applications.

-- 
 \         "I was gratified to be able to answer promptly and I did. I |
  `\    said I didn't know."  -- Mark Twain, _Life on the Mississippi_ |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney