Comment by anon3_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon3_ | Hacker News Reader

Python:

- useful glue-language

- prominent C API.

- It handles web applications, scientific applications, shell-scripting, data-processing.

- It's installed on virtually every OS X and Linux/BSD machine.

- job market is active and work tends to pay well.

- The contrib (open source, permissively licensed libraries) are robust, abundant and well-documented.

- The standard library is also.

- Python 3 unicode support + python 2.7 support via unicode_literals

- Support for deployment to Google's cloud, Amazon, Heroku

- Many prominent tech companies (facebook, google, dropbox) sponsor and release open source applications for python.

- Faster implementations such as Pypy (a speedier, pure-python implementation) and Pyston (LLVM implementation) are under active development

- REPL via bpython, ipython, ptpython is great

- Mature language (around since the 90's)

I could go on and on. You can't really miss with python, it's a "safe language" from a job perspective, but also superb should own your desires go to freelance, your own startup, etc.

Thank you very much for the feedback. If I may ask, how do you tackle the short comings of the language such as battling with "freezing" an application to work from an executable on windows?

I find myself bashing my head against the Windows platform way too many a time. (A hangover from my current day job)

Are there any significant drawbacks to using Python? (Other than the usual cries about the GIL and it being interpreted voiced by certain groups in the programming world.)

You mean http://www.py2exe.org/?

Drawbacks, the tooling is superb, but it will take you months to wrap your brains around the tooling, idioms and best practices. Expect a learning curve to get acclimated with things.

Another plus is the community is self-aware and wants to get work done.

There are other programming languages where if you criticize them - instead of taking it as an engineer - they get their feelings hurt and delve into deeper denial.

In 2015, there are numerous tools to handle cases where GIL, as an example. https://wiki.python.org/moin/Concurrency/

Yes py2exe and freeze etc. I agree the tooling for python is very good and I find the community to be one of the better ones as you have mentioned.

Coming from a pure Microsoft background, and that not being C# but databases and cubes, I find some of the freedom in the ways of working with Python "scary" at times. Microsoft tends to build a nice set of tracks that their developers seem to follow so it all ends up very corporate and "best practice". (Just my personal opinion) It thus feels like there are much more "training wheels" applied for beginners in something like C# and .Net than what you have in most open source technologies.

Thanks again for your replies.

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