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Bits from the world of the Python programming language.

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Saturday, March 29, 2003

I've been trying to determine, for no particular reason other than to justify a year and a half of lurking and push my product management knowlege, what the audience is for Python?

At best I can come up with: Problem solvers approaching the scenario through computer scripts and applications.

I chose scenario over solution, as Python is an excellent candidate for determining the problem, not just the final implementation, unless solving a problem implicitly includes refining the problem.

I'm not sure the extent of a "General Purpose Programming Language", but would it help defining where Python is not appropriate? Device Drivers & Kernel Development, ...?

At first I thought perhaps this could be defined in "What is the Market" for the Python, but that's a potentially different can of worms.

11:02:20 AM

I have rarely seen Apple marketing material mention Python (and Ruby for that matter) whereas Perl (and Java?) is consistently included in news of web and open source related news.

Per ADC newsletter, The "O'Reilly Open Source Convention and The Perl Conference." This is also the Python (and Ruby) Conference.

Apple Mailing Lists are Python Powered (Mailman) yet the new web-development list description is rather watered down, and I thought the original announcement was similarly short. Don't have it available, so no great accuracy here.

Google Apple for Python and Ruby, Zope..heck, Plone. To keep email address bot harvesters out the achives the lists have a published password gate the lists don't seem to be searchable via Google. But even using the given search page, I had no hits for Python.

I don't like consistent comparison's of Python and Ruby, but there's a sense of need to include a related other overlooked Perl alternatives. "Alternatives"- yikes, this is going nowhere fast.

Python's syntax has, to developers, what OSX gives to users: Clarity, Simplicity, Elegance while allowing portability (Well, Unix app's are more easily portable to OSX) and extensibilitiy (OS X's Unix angle and Python's C, Java and other extensions and wrappers. It will be disappointing if OSX Web Developers also overlook the elegance and simplicity of Plone.

10:51:46 AM