Why python?
Posted by Raja Ramanathan on October 4, 2006
Learning a new programming language is quite an investment (timewise) for a new programmers. Though not a lot for experienced programmers it would still be question of choice. Like why not Perl/Ruby? etc., Based on my experience I would say python is a must for new or experienced programmers. The syntactic simplicity helps new programmers focus primarirly on learning programming aspects. For experienced programmers this language is for improving your productivity. At the very least it helps to automate adhoc tasks that you would otherwise do manually. Believe it or not I was able to develop a stand-alone simple & short command-line program to rename files under directories (including subdir) with wildcard style filtering in less than hour. That too while learning python. I cannot imagine doing this in C++/Java/C# with that speed no matter what the level of experience is. Having such a language in my toolkit (skillset) will certainly help me be a more productive engineer. So the journey now begins..
For experienced programmers, here are some industry experts view on python.
1. Bruce Eckels view on python:
1.1 Why I Love python: His top 10 reasons for loving python. Excellent one. You can also read his conversation with Bill on explaining certain points on Why I Love python.
1.2 Strong Typing vs Strong Testing: His view on why python’s dynamic typing makes it more productive way of developing than other languages.
