Introducing Python to others

[David C. Ullrich]

In article <mailman.2701.1238060157.11746.python-list at python.org>,
 "Paddy O'Loughlin" <patrick.oloughlin at gmail.com> wrote:

Here's my favorite thing about Python (you'd of course
remark that it's just a toy example, doing everything
in as dumb but easily understood way as possible):

x=[1,2]

print x+x

class Vector():
  def __init__(self, data):
    self.data = data
  def __repr__(self):
    return repr(self.data)
  def __add__(self, other):
    return Vector([self.data[0]+other.data[0],
                  self.data[1]+other.data[1]])

x = Vector([1,2])

print x+x

> 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

-- 
David C. Ullrich