Introducing Python to others

[*nixtechno]

On Mar 26, 2:35 am, "Paddy O'Loughlin" <patrick.olough... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 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!"

Yeah tell them that they don't have to REWRITE all their code again,
just fix VERY MINOR things when required if there is a drastic
change... I would bite if I learned this a long time ago if I knew
that, and also threading in python is WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
better, somethings in PHP you can't do like you can within python when
it comes to threading (which I'm stumped on right now in a project of
mine...)

I may add that debugging is a learning curve for sure, how and where
to place what when trying to debug a script in python.... So I would
mostly concentrate on the CORE thing of NO MORE rewriting your WHOLE
library for a change like you have to do with PHP. :)

My opinion.