Author Topic: PYTHON  (Read 3009 times)

KnuckleBuckett

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PYTHON
« on: August 23, 2013, 09:21:37 AM »

webwhy

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Re: PYTHON
« Reply #1 on: August 23, 2013, 10:07:23 AM »
I'm using a lot of Python in my graduate program. I was primarily a web application developer using Ruby for the last 6 or so years. I think Python is a great utility language, and it rivals Java (perhaps exceeds in the realm of numerical computing) in terms of library support. That and its "simple" syntax are it's greatest assets.

Ruby is a non factor in serious computing; it's only really viable in web applications. Meaning a vast majority of it's libraries (gems) are geared for supporting that use case.

one caveat: it can be confusing to people who don't understand text files and true nature of whitespace. Others in my program who do not come from CompSci background stumbled on whitespace equivalence and were frustrated by syntax errors. Outside of that it's relatively easy to become productive in Python.

Perspective

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Re: PYTHON
« Reply #2 on: August 23, 2013, 10:47:44 AM »
I love python for quick one-off scripts and pretty much anything to do with text processing. I wouldn't use it for anything that needs to scale in-memory though. I've run into issues once you get into 10s of millions of objects in memory.

hans

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Re: PYTHON
« Reply #3 on: August 23, 2013, 11:01:38 AM »
I used to give Python programmers a hard time and now I'm a big fan of the language. I've been doing most of my side project in Python now. I really like Groovy though for the JVM work, but JVMs are resource hogs if you just need something simple. If you're going to be doing "serious" computing and need more speed then I highly recommend looking at Go (golang.org). I've really fallen in love with the clear coding I've been getting from Python and it's very quick to develop in (much like Groovy). Go take a bit more work and usually requires refactoring code I've just written to be more concise where I seem to get Python right the first time. And I really don't worry all that much about scale as much of the stuff I do, that can be solved by adding a box and load balancing. The development speed beats out performance worries for most of the stuff. I'm thinking I might try and look for a Python gig for my next job.
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