Why Python?
Posted by JanWan
Last Updated: July 17, 2012
J.W. PRODUCTION

Why Python?

My first look at Python was an accident, and I didn't much like what I saw at the time. It was early 1997, and Mark Lutz's book Programming Python from O'Reilly & Associates had recently come out. O'Reilly books occasionally land on my doorstep, selected from among the new releases by some mysterious benefactor inside the organization using a random process I've given up trying to understand.

One of them was Programming Python. I found this somewhat interesting, as I collect computer languages. I know over two dozen general-purpose languages, write compilers and interpreters for fun, and have designed any number of special-purpose languages and markup formalisms myself. My most recently completed project, as I write this, is a special-purpose language called SNG for manipulating PNG (Portable Network Graphics) images. Interested readers can surf to the SNG home page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/sng/. I have also written implementations of several odd general-purpose languages on my Retrocomputing Museum page, http://www.catb.org/retro/.

I had already heard just enough about Python to know that it is what is nowadays called a “scripting language”, an interpretive language with its own built-in memory management and good facilities for calling and cooperating with other programs. So I dived into Programming Python with one question uppermost in my mind: what has this got that Perl does not?

 

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Reference: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

 

J.W. PRODUCTION

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