Introducing Python to others

Paddy O'Loughlin patrick.oloughlin at gmail.com
Thu Mar 26 05:35:55 EDT 2009


Hi,
As our resident python advocate, I've been asked by my team leader to
give a bit of a presentation as an introduction to python to the rest
of our department.
It'll be less than an hour, with time for taking questions at the end.

There's not going to be a whole lot of structure to it. First, I'm
going to open up a python terminal and show them how the interpreter
works and a few basic syntax things and then a file .py files (got to
show them that python's indenting structure is not something to be
afraid of :P). I think I'll mostly show things in the order that they
appear in the python tutorial (http://docs.python.org/tutorial/).

My question to you, dear python-list, is what suggestions do you have
for aspects of python that I should show them to make them maybe think
that python is better than what they are using at the moment.
All of the audience will be experienced (4+ years) programmers, almost
all of them are PHP developers (2 others, plus myself, work in C, know
C#, perl, java, etc.).
Because of this, I was thinking of making sure I included exceptions
and handling, the richness of the python library and a pointing out
how many modules there were out there to do almost anything one could
think of.
Anything else you think could make PHP developers starting think that
python is a better choice?
If I were to do a (very) short demonstration one web framework for the
PHP devs, what should I use? CherryPy (seems to be the easiest),
Django (seems to be the "biggest"/most used), or something else?

Any other suggestions for a possible "wow" reaction from an audience like that?

Thanks,
Paddy

-- 
"Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!"



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