Why Python?

I first heard about Python from a roommate about 5 or 6 years ago. He was putting together a presentation for some Bio-informatics people, and was going to go over the basics of Python programming as its very popular in the scientific community. I didn't give it much though as I was mainly using Perl at the time for any programming work, and the white space was of course somewhat of a put-off.

Fast forward a few years… I had been programming rather heavily in Perl at the time, and despite having used Perl literally for years, I still felt like I hadn't achieved “mastery”. The effects of code in Perl would jump out and surprise me every few days, and sometimes hunting down weird bugs due to ambiguous syntax was rather time consuming. In short, Perl just wasn't fun anymore.

I started looking around for other languages, and took a look at Ruby. Back then, Ruby had the same things that were annoying me about Perl. Implicit variables that seemingly came out of nowhere (@_, $_, etc), inconsistencies, and since the community was so small it lacked the vibrant and active development Perl had. Ruby also was missing so many of the CPAN modules I had come to rely on. Then browsing through some of Eric Raymond's writings, I came across an article about Python he wrote titled the same as this blog entry.

White space and Mastery

My white space fears were removed rather quickly.

Of course, this brought me face to face once again with Python's pons asinorum, the
significance of whitespace. This time, however, I charged ahead and roughed out some
code for a handful of sample GUI elements. Oddly enough, Python's use of whitespace
stopped feeling unnatural after about twenty minutes. I just indented code, pretty
much as I would have done in a C program anyway, and it worked.

But this wasn't what truly piqued my interest. As I mentioned, the feeling that Perl was somehow beyond mastery. To me, mastery means that I can write massive chunks of code with confidence it'll act exactly as I intended it to. So seeing Raymonds next few paragraphs really got me going.

That was my first surprise. My second came a couple of hours into the project, when I 
noticed (allowing for pauses needed to look up new features in Programming Python) I 
was generating working code nearly as fast as I could type. When I realized this, I 
was quite startled. An important measure of effort in coding is the frequency with 
which you write something that doesn't actually match your mental representation of 
the problem, and have to backtrack on realizing that what you just typed won't 
actually tell the language to do what you're thinking. An important measure of good 
language design is how rapidly the percentage of missteps of this kind falls as you 
gain experience with the language.

This is all summed up very nicely,

I wrote a working, usable fetchmailconf, with GUI, in six working days, of which 
perhaps the equivalent of two days were spent learning Python itself. This reflects 
another useful property of the language: it is compact--you can hold its entire 
feature set (and at least a concept index of its libraries) in your head. C is a 
famously compact language. Perl is notoriously not; one of the things the notion 
``There's more than one way to do it!'' costs Perl is the possibility of compactness.

Being compact is a valuable asset for Python. Not only does it make writing large blocks of code without error possible, but it also means the code is going to be easy to read. After opening up a few other Python projects and scanning through the code, I was hooked and proceeded to buy the Learning Python book (Though the online tutorials would've been just fine as well).

Black Magic isn't so Black

Since then, I've been using Python close to non-stop for just a little over a year. In just the first week of using Python, I felt more productive and wrote code I was positive would work (just as ESR said) on the first try. A few months ago, interested in learning even deeper “black magic” of Python, I went to a presentation by Alex Martelli on Python's Black Magic, Meta-classes and Descriptors.

The most fascinating thing was that meta-classes got their behavior from simple concepts I already knew. It was hard to believe things were so easy. Eric Raymond also noticed this:

It's remarkable enough when implementations of simple techniques work exactly as 
expected the first time; but my first metaclass hack in a new language, six days from 
a cold standing start? Even if we stipulate that I am a fairly talented hacker, this 
is an amazing testament to Python's clarity and elegance of design.

Fields of Use

I have now written quite a few projects in Python, and on several of the open-source ones heard, “I just wanted to add Feature X to this, and I was actually able to figure it out just look at the code. I don't even know Python!”

These projects span fields: shell scripts, network daemons, web applications, computing, GUI's, and more. Learning Python is useful for many fields, and I know people learning Python right now so they can tackle problems in different fields with a compact language thats easy to master.

The Choir

I realize that this entry, carried by Planet Python, is mostly preaching to the choir. However, I felt something like this was needed. Partly because some members of the Python community have gotten odd impressions about what we should try and do in Python and what we should just “give up” on, having lost some sort of war (bizarre, I know).

People come to Python for a variety of reasons, they stay for a variety of reasons. Having compelling tools to make tasks easy in many fields is great, and means there's no need to learn new languages solely to try and make a task in one field slightly easier (Though its always healthy to learn more).

It's definitely valuable knowledge to know why a task in one field is easy using Language X, and for that alone its good to give it a spin. Learn what was done right, and what was done wrong. In the end though, if that language isn't a compact language like Python, I'm just not going to enjoy it as much.

I didn't start learning Python because of Application/Framework Y, I learned it because Python is exceptionally compelling by itself. Others learn it for the same reason, and despite the bizarre claim that book sales is equivalent to language usage/popularity, it should be obvious by now that a book isn't needed to master Python.

For those demoralized because some other language is getting attention due to a field its had a huge impact on, re-evaluate your feelings. This isn't the first time its happened, and it won't be the last. Google uses Python, ILM uses Python, thousands (yes, thousands) of major corporations use Python.

Python doesn't need to be master of every field, it just needs something compelling enough that you're as productive using it as you would be using a different tool in a language that isn't so compact.