Hi Steve,
On 12/25/2015 09:03 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> >
>> >One persistently tempting question about using Python, or any other
>> >interpreted programming language, is why they are used?
> I can answer that, always assuming speed and hardware interfacing
> aren't an issue:
>
> 1) For performing the same task, Python's always much easier to
> program. And easier algorithms mean less dark corners for bugs to
> hide.
>
> 2) Python (and Perl, Ruby, Lua and Scheme) is already debugged and
> secure. Without C's pointers, overflowable arrays, manual garbage
> collection, matching of mallocs and frees, and other security
> problems, one can write a secure Python program with a lot less
> security knowledge.
>
> 3) Assuming your Python program doesn't import a bunch of seldom-used
> Python libraries, deployment is*much* easier. Deploying a
> well-written Python program is a mere wget. I once had a distro with
> a bad or missing youtube-dl package. Because it's just a python
> script, I copied it from the Internet onto my path, and bang, I had
> youtube-dl. Try that with any C program.
>
> 4) Python has several ways of invoking a binary program, so if one part
> of the project absolutely requires C, that part can be a tiny C
> program that's easy and secure to program, and have it called by
> Python.
>
> 5) A lot of the functionality of a C program could be imitated by
> existing POSIX tools like cat, grep, awk, sed, cut, sort, gzip, and
> the like. Running these programs first, in order to cut way down on
> the data transfer, can allow the stdout to go into a Python program
> that can keep up with the process.
>
>
> Truth be told, if I were a business' manager of software development,
> any time somebody wanted to write something in C I'd make him/her
> justify doing so by proving it would be disadvantageous to write it in
> Python (or Perl or Ruby or Lua or Scheme or whatever).
>
>
> SteveT
In my opinion, python is a good tool for that. Easy to understand, easy
to translate..., and a complement for C language, because they share
libraries. You can also run shell scripts via os.system(). Add to this
tools like PyGtk and PyQt for graphical interfaces.
Go ahead :)
Aitor.