Why did Quora choose Python for its development?

[Octavian Rasnita]

Subject: Re: Why did Quora choose Python for its development?
> I've been programming for about seven years, and am basically 
> self-taught. I got my first taste of writing code when trying do to some 
> basic hacking on my (then) shiny new G3 iBook. (Even though it was a 
> Mac, I was enthralled by its Unix underpinnings.) C was too hard for a 
> programming newbie, and (at the time) I only understood shell to be a 
> sequential series of commands. (cd ~/.Trash; ls; rm *)
> 
> My goal was to write desktop GUI apps, and looking around at the 
> available languages, libraries, and toolkits for Unix and the Mac, I 
> settled on Tk as the UI toolkit, since it seemed to be the simplest one 
> out there, and on Tcl and Python as the programming languages. (A brief 
> detour with AppleScript convinced me that it is a useful scripting 
> language for hooking into various parts of OS X, but it is not very 
> powerful.)
> 
> While Tcl doesn't get a lot of love or respect on this list, it is quite 
> powerful in its way, and an understanding of Tcl is quite useful in 
> particular for understanding Tk and its Python wrapper, Tkinter. After 
> becoming productive with Tcl and writing a couple of applications in it, 
> I turned to Python in earnest and set about learning its capabilities as 
> well, and have since released a couple of Python desktop apps on the Mac 
> (commercial apps, using Tk as the toolkit).
> 
> With that background, here are my reasons for keeping Python in my toolbox:
> 
> 1. Its core libraries and third-party packages address nearly every 
> imaginable need. The size of its community is a real asset here. Tcl is 
> a more compact language, with a smaller core library and fewer 
> third-party packages (no library comparable to Mark Pilgrim's 
> feedparser, for instance), which means that for some use cases, using 
> Tcl would mean more work.
> 
> 2. Python has excellent tools for deployment of desktop apps. Since I 
> only work on the Mac, I'm not that familiar with py2exe, but py2app and 
> bundlebuilder have always allowed me to wrap up my apps with an embedded 
> Python interpreter with a minimum of fuss. Tcl also excels in deployment 
> of desktop apps; other languages, such as Perl and Ruby, seem to lag 
> behind in this respect. (I could find no actively-maintained, 
> open-source, Mac-viable desktop app bundling tools for either Ruby or 
> Perl, which cooled my interest in them considerably.)
> 
> 3. Python's binding to Tk makes writing GUI apps a straightforward 
> process. Since I already knew Tk quite well, learning its Python 
> bindings was much simpler than learning another GUI toolkit such as PyQt 
> or wxPython. The strategies I learned from Tcl to develop sophisticated 
> Tk-based UI's translate quite well to Python.
> 
> Python isn't perfect; for some instances, I find Tcl a more lightweight 
> and accessible tool to use. I also spend a lot of time digging into Tcl 
> and Tk's C API to extend their capabilities in certain ways; this also 
> allows my Python apps to access such enhancements, via Tkinter. But all 
> in all I'm a happy user of Python, and it will continue to have a 
> primary place in my toolbox.
> 
> --Kevin


Hi Kevin,

Thanks for your message. It is helpful to know why some programmers prefer a certain OS, programming language, module or program, because this way the newbies can find its benefits rapidly.

Yes there are packiging solutions for Perl under Mac, but I haven't tried them because I never used a Mac, however, I agree that python is better than Perl for creating desktop apps, because the modules which are used for creating GUIs are better developed.

Too bad that you prefer Tk-based GUIs, because they are simple to use, I agree, but they create and promote discrimination because they are not accessible at all for the screen readers used by the blind.

The standard Win32 GUIS/MFC or the libs that use those GUIs like Java SWT and wxWIDGETS used by WxPerl, WxPython... are much better accessible. Somebody told that he will try to make Tk accessible, but just as I expected, I haven't heard anything until now about any kind of success of that project.

Octavian