Python programming language

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Python is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools, comes with extensive standard libraries, and can be learned in a few days. Many Python programmers report substantial productivity gains and feel the language encourages the development of better code.

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is ruby 1.9 really faster than python? jason — 12 months ago

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Ohloh Analysis Summary

Updated 02 Jul 2009 19:22 UTC

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over 2 years ago Avatar
Mature, Good OO

    by darrint

Python is an excellent language for getting all kinds of work done. For OO programmers it offers a dynamic object model.

It's not difficult to find good reviews of Python on the Internet, so I'll focus on it's weaknesses.

Out-of-the box Python lacks popular high-level concurrency support. There is no high level interprocess communication library, no lightweight processes, no transactional memory etc.

To address this one ... [More] can either "roll-their-own" or look into Twisted or Stackless Python. In the case of Twisted one must commit to an "unnatural" programming model. Stackless requires recompiling python.

One this commitment is made there are significant communities behind both projects, however, these communities are tiny in comparison to the mainstream python community.

Python also lacks a macro or similar facility. The official position of the Python maintainer is that python will never had such a facility.

Python also lacks out of the box support for "freezing" apps into bundles which can be run on machines lacking an os provided python interpreter, or an older version of one than desired. Assembling these bundles for the big three major desktop operating systems, Windows, OS X, and Linux, requires tracking down a lot of software all over the web and doing a lot of scripting if the app in questions is non-trivial.

Currently, popular python libraries for doing this are py2exe for Windows, py2app for OS X, and cx_freeze for Posix.

Buildbot (a twisted application, see above) is popular for running build farms and automating testing and app bundle building.

Despite these flaws, python is an practical language for getting work done in a timely manner and having a maintainable codebase when finished.
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over 2 years ago Avatar
Python is great!

  by ThomasWaldmann

Python is the best general-purpose programming language I ever used (having studied CS and being a geek, I used or looked at quite a lot of them in the last 25 years).

It is new enough to be well-designed and high-level.
It is mature enough to be very useful and well-behaved.

Coding in Python is easy, fun and going fast.

You can easily read code (no matter if it is your own code or code of someone else), because it ... [More] is high-level and clean.

You can easily write code. The code volume you need to get something done is usually much less than in other programming languages (and this is not just about typing stuff, having less code means also less bugs, less maintenance costs).

Often you don't have to write code, as it comes with a good standard library that contains lots of useful and easy to re-use code. There are also lots of python modules available on the internet.

You can easily debug code. You can try code in the interactive interpreter. No need to compile the code, just run it.

There are great IDEs for Python, e.g. Eclipse/PyDev or Eric (plus many others I didn't use yet).

You can easily get platform-independent code (runs on Linux, Mac, Win32 and many others).

If you have questions, there is a big community of python coders (web sites, irc channels, mailing lists, news groups, user groups).
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    Python 3.0 is an ex-release! Long live Python 3.1!

    Posted 4 days ago

    There will be no Python 3.0.2 release or further 3.0.x maintenance/security releases. All users of Python 3.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Python 3.1.

    SciPy 2009 - Conference for Scientific Computing

    Posted 6 days ago

    The 8th annual SciPy Conference will be held at Caltech in Pasadena, California from August 18th to the 23rd. See the Call for Papers if you'd like to present.

    PyOhio Talks Schedule Posted

    Posted 9 days ago

    The preliminary schedule of talks for PyOhio has been posted, with twenty-five talks and tutorials planned on a variety of Python programming topics. PyOhio 2009 takes place July 25-26 in Columbus, Ohio, and is free of charge. See pyohio.org for more information and to register (registration opening soon).

    Python 3.1 released

    Posted 9 days ago

    The first production version of Python 3.1 is now available.

    PSF Community Awards go to Stephan Deibel & Sean Reifschneider

    Posted 18 days ago

    The latest recipients of the Python Software Foundation Community Awards are Stephan Deibel and Sean Reifschneider (PSF blog announcement), in recognition of their significant contributions to the PSF, PyCon US, and the Python community. Congratulations and thanks!

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