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Why python???

John J. Lee jjl at pobox.com
Sat Sep 6 08:37:29 EDT 2003 
"Michael Peuser" <mpeuser at web.de> writes:
> "Alex Martelli" <aleax at aleax.it>
[...]
> My other point was that there nothing like that is going on in the software
> development business. The price of tools is of no significance. It is the
> (expected increase of productivity) The DoD Ada is the best example I can
> think of.

I haven't noticed anybody here arguing about tool costs.  The issue is
productivity.

[...]
> In most companies you do not train programmers but (try to) hire experienced
> staff.

Now we're going round in circles.  This point has already been addressed.

[...about Prechelt's study:]
> There will be different results when doing embedded applications

Gee, I guess you're right. ;-)


> Coding is agreed, maintenance is still questionable.

You believe fewer lines of code, written in a language that almost
everybody who uses it claims is the most readable they've ever seen,
results in maintenance problems?  Perhaps you haven't discovered
thorough unit-testing.

[...]
> > It's been done more than once, and it's being done again as we speak,
> > many times over -- again, see the Python Success Stories.  Google is
[...]
> It is not clear whether this is just a niche market like e.g. MATLAB.

I honestly can't find any sense in that statement -- it's a foolishly
empirical statement (and doesn't even reflect the empirical data).
What reason do you have for thinking that Python is somehow magically
restricted to implementing large search-engines??  Is it full of
task-specific syntax and semantics like MATLAB?  Have you read the
success stories page, or peoples' reports in this group?


John
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