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Python 1.6 The balanced language

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 31 02:50:20 EDT 2000 
"Steve Holden" <sholden at holdenweb.com> wrote in message
news:39ADEA85.7C38771D at holdenweb.com...
    [snip]
> Surely the best approach accepts that some problems are best for one
> language, others for another, so we should just use the appropriate
> language for each problem.

Oh yes.  And in many real applications, we can mix components that
address different aspects and can thus benefit from different
languages' strengths, thus...:

> A better way would be to work towards allowing Python code to be mixed
> with Icon, so we could easily write programs which combine the best
> features of both without having to turn either into a monster
unrecognisable
> even to its mother :-).  Then we could produce object-oriented programs
> which used backtracking, generators and coexpressions.

As long as we take "combined" to mean "in the same application",
rather than "inside the same source-text", I fully agree.  So,
what we need, for this task as well as many others, is a well-
balanced, cross-language, cross-platform componentization scheme.

EJB is probably too Java-centric; .NET is probably too Windows-
centric.  Corba (the classic variant) seems to focus too much on
issues of distributed computing, rather than of mixing components
and deploying/reusing components.  Maybe the new 'Corba 3' offers
hope?  I know little about it, except that it explicitly targets
components (at long last) and introduces a new dedicated scripting
language (boo, hiss).  Are there some previews/prototypes allowing
one to play with it (particularly with Python)...?  What about
XPCOM -- is it enough of a COM clone to let one do components
powerfully and portably, or (as is my impression) does it lack
even more on the scripting/runtime-use-of-components than COM
proper does; and if the latter, is it still worth taking as a
starting point...?


Alex
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