Re: Best Description I Ever Read of Python....
Python's a great language for people who aren't programmers and never intend to become full-time programmers. I'm a systems engineer; I can knock shit together in Python fairly quickly and easily. I know network engineers who learn it. Hell, I know architects - not systems architects, actual building architects - who have learned a bit of python to help with scripting in Revit. Actual programmers who specialize in Python as their main job? Not so much.
Well this is just wrong. Python's ease of use for the novice is a benefit for the pro as well. It is an extremely expressive language that allows you to write a lot of functionality with a small amount of code. You can prototype faster in python, and the expressiveness means that refactoring is simple and, if following the pythonic style, simple.
The speed of python is not really relevant in most scenarios as anything cpu intensive can be written as a C extension, with a pythonic API added over the top. This usually makes the underlying library much easier to use, for instance it is much easier (less typing and clearer to the reader) to write XML and XPath manipulations using the python lxml library than it is to use libxml2 in C, but the speed of operation of both is virtually identical - python is just the plumbing around the boiler.
I don't think the criticism of the python open source libraries is particularly fair, as it applies to all languages with lots of open source libraries; you have to assess the quality and reliability yourself before using it. There are a lot of rubbish ones, but there are a lot of good ones also.
PS: The term "pythonic"; lots of people don't seem to like it, but this is what it stands for (verbatim from the language spec):
* Beautiful is better than ugly
* Explicit is better than implicit
* Simple is better than complex
* Complex is better than complicated
* Readability counts
Argue against any of those points..I'm guessing bob will try