[Tutor] Python Advocacy

[Daniel Kinnaer]

When it comes to testing a language, one has to be very
careful.  If I remember well, in the "old days" Basic was often compared
to Turbo Pascal and Turbo C and the testers used a.o. the Sieve
of Erastothenes to make those comparisons.  Now, what is interesting
in this story is that at some time, there were very optimized
Basic-subroutines for the Sieve, which they were running on 
faster/better PCs as well, thus making Basic "as fast as" Pascal or C !  

Let us come up with something honest:
- note what a language can do and what a language can't do 
- test the the common parts (like SMTP, the Sieve, database,...)
- use the same hardware and OS for the tests
- test with equivalent knowledge (newbie, intermediate, expert)
- test the ease of changing the code after a few weeks/months

This little list can be extended in many ways, but I guess I
summed up the important points, though.

Hope to read about these tests pretty soon!  


Best regards,
Daniel